Perform Writable Volume Operations (Move, Back Up, and Restore)

You can move a Writable Volume from one storage to another. You can also take a backup of the Writable Volume and restore the volume.

You can back up a single Writable Volume, or multiple Writable Volumes, but you can only restore a single Writable Volumes. To take regular backups of the Writable Volumes, you can also schedule App Volumes Manager.

Note: You cannot move, back up, and restore storage groups.

Thin Provisioning and Writable Volumes

If you move or back up a Writable Volume to a storage that does not support thin provisioning, the volume is expanded and becomes a flat VMDK on the destination storage. You can see the expanded size on the Backup Writable Volume and the Move Writable Volume windows in the App Volumes Manager UI. For example: Move Writable Volume for user1 - 400.00 MB (expanded: 10.00 GB)

If you restore a Writable Volumes that is flat, it remains flat, and does not get converted back to a sparse volume.

Using Shared Datastores for Writable Volumes Operations

You must have a shared datastore between the source and destination vCenter Server to move and back up Writable Volumes across different vCenter Servers and if the source Writable Volumes are located in a non-shared datastore.

To back up a Writable Volume across different vCenter Servers with the volume located in a non-shared datastore, you must first move the Writable Volume to a shared datastore, and then back up the Writable Volume to the destination vCenter Server.

For information about shared datastores, see Support for Shared Datastores.