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Creating snapshots of boot and data volumes

Snapshots are a point-in-time copy of your Block Storage for VPC boot or data volume that you manually create. To create a snapshot, the original volume must be attached to a running virtual server instance. The first snapshot is a full backup of the volume. Subsequent snapshots of the same volume record only the changes since the last snapshot.

You can access a snapshot of a boot volume and use it to provision a new boot volume. You can create a data volume from a snapshot (called restoring a volume) and attach it to an instance. Snapshots are persistent; they have a lifecycle that is independent from the original volume.

Creating snapshots of a custom image data volume

You can create a snapshot or create an image External link icon from a boot volume on a virtual server instance. The image is a full copy of the source volume. It includes the operating system and any user data.

However, you cannot create an image from a data volume. To make a copy of a data volume, you need to create a snapshot of the volume.

When you create a virtual server instance from a custom image that you produced with IBM Wazi Image Builder, it contains both a boot volume and a data volume. The z/OS Wazi aaS custom image is more dependent on the data volume.

If you want to make a copy of this virtual server instance, make sure to create a snapshot of the data volume as well. You can then create new instances from the images and snapshots.

For more information, see the following topics in IBM Cloud documentation: