The product described by this documentation, GKE on AWS, is now in maintenance mode and will be shut down on March 17, 2027.

Snapshot a PersistentVolume

You can use the Kubernetes volume snapshot feature for Persistent volumes and dynamic provisioning in your GKE clusters.

Volume snapshots let you create a copy of your volume at a specific point in time. You can use this copy to bring a volume back to a prior state or to provision a replacement volume.

You can provision and attach volume snapshots with the following components:

Requirements

To use volume snapshots on GKE on AWS, you must have the following:

A volume using a Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver that supports snapshots. The Elastic Block Store (EBS) drivers that GKE on AWS uses by default support snapshots.

For a list of all CSI drivers that support snapshots, see the "Other features" column in Drivers in the Kubernetes documentation.
Have an existing PersistentVolumeClaim to use for a snapshot. The PersistentVolume you use for a snapshot source must be managed by a CSI driver. You can verify that you're using a CSI driver by checking that the PersistentVolume spec has a csi section with driver: ebs.csi.aws.com . If your cluster Dynamically provisions PersistentVolumes by the CSI driver as described in the following sections, it's managed by the CSI driver.

Before you begin

Create and use a volume snapshot

The examples in this document show you how to do the following tasks:

Create an example PersistentVolumeClaim and Pod.
Create a VolumeSnapshot.
Restore the volume snapshot.
Verify that the restoration worked.

To use a volume snapshot, you must complete the following steps:

Create a VolumeSnapshot object to request a snapshot of an existing PersistentVolumeClaim.
Reference the VolumeSnapshot in a PersistentVolumeClaim to restore a volume to that snapshot or create a new volume using the snapshot.

Create an example `PersistentVolumeClaim` and `Pod`

To create the PersistentVolumeClaim object, save the following manifest as example-pvc.yaml:
```
apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
  name: example-pvc
spec:
  storageClassName: standard-rwo
  accessModes:
  - ReadWriteOnce
  resources:
    requests:
      storage: 1Gi
```
For spec.storageClassName, you can specify any storage class that uses a supported CSI driver. This example uses the default standard-rwo storage class.
Apply the manifest:
```
kubectl apply -f example-pvc.yaml
```

Create a Pod that writes the current date and time to the volume. To create a Pod, save the following manifest as snapshot-shell.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: snapshot-shell
spec:
  terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 10
  containers:
  - name: linux
    image: ubuntu:bionic
    command: ["/bin/sh"]
    args: ["-c", "echo $(date -u) >> /data/out.txt"]
    volumeMounts:
    - name: snapshot-volume
      mountPath: /data
  restartPolicy: Never
  volumes:
  - name: snapshot-volume
    persistentVolumeClaim:
      claimName: example-pvc

Apply the manifest:
```
kubectl apply -f snapshot-shell.yaml
```
Check the status of the Pod:
```
kubectl get pod snapshot-shell
```
It might take some time for the Pod to run and complete. You can run the preceding command until you see an output similar to the following:
```
NAME             READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
snapshot-shell   0/1     Completed   0          24s
```

Create a VolumeSnapshot

A VolumeSnapshot object is a request for a snapshot of an existing PersistentVolumeClaim object. When you create a VolumeSnapshot object, your cluster automatically creates and binds it with a VolumeSnapshotContent object, which is a resource in your cluster like a PersistentVolume object.

Save the following manifest as volumesnapshot.yaml.

apiVersion: snapshot.storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: VolumeSnapshot
metadata:
  name: example-snapshot
spec:
  source:
    persistentVolumeClaimName: example-pvc

Apply the manifest:
```
kubectl apply -f volumesnapshot.yaml
```
After you create a volume snapshot, your cluster creates a corresponding VolumeSnapshotContent object. This object stores the snapshot and bindings of VolumeSnapshot objects. You do not interact with VolumeSnapshotContents objects directly.

Confirm that your cluster created the VolumeSnapshotContents object:

kubectl get volumesnapshotcontents

The output is similar to the following:

NAME                                               AGE
snapcontent-cee5fb1f-5427-11ea-a53c-42010a1000da   55s

Confirm the volume snapshot is ready

After the volume snapshot content is created, the CSI driver you specified in the VolumeSnapshotClass creates a snapshot on the corresponding storage system. After your cluster creates a snapshot on the storage system and binds it to a VolumeSnapshot object, the snapshot is ready to use. You can check the status by running the following command:

kubectl get volumesnapshot \
  -o custom-columns='NAME:.metadata.name,READY:.status.readyToUse'

If the snapshot is ready to use, the output is similar to the following:

NAME                    READY
example-snapshot        true

Restore the volume snapshot

You can reference a VolumeSnapshot in a PersistentVolumeClaim to provision a new volume with data from an existing volume or restore a volume to a state that you captured in the snapshot.

To reference a VolumeSnapshot in a PersistentVolumeClaim, add the dataSource field to your PersistentVolumeClaim.

In this example, you reference the VolumeSnapshot that you created in a new PersistentVolumeClaim and create a Pod that mounts the PersistentVolumeClaim.

Save the following manifest as pvc-restore.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
metadata:
 name: pvc-restore
spec:
 dataSource:
   name: example-snapshot
   kind: VolumeSnapshot
   apiGroup: snapshot.storage.k8s.io
 storageClassName: standard-rwo
 accessModes:
   - ReadWriteOnce
 resources:
   requests:
     storage: 1Gi

Apply the manifest:
```
kubectl apply -f pvc-restore.yaml
```

Launch a temporary Pod that mounts the PVC to the Pod and prints the contents of out.txt to logs.

Save the following manifest as restore-log.yaml:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: restore-verify
spec:
  volumes:
    - name: restore-data
      persistentVolumeClaim:
        claimName: pvc-restore
  containers:
    - name: shell-container
      image: ubuntu:bionic
      volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: "/data"
          name: restore-data
      command: [ "/bin/sh" ]
      args: ["-c", "cat /data/out.txt", "exit", "1"]
  restartPolicy: Never

Apply the manifest:
```
kubectl apply -f restore-log.yaml
```

Check that the snapshot restored successfully

The Pod you created in the previous step reads from the snapshot. To view the data from the snapshot, use the kubectl logs command.

kubectl logs restore-verify

The output should include a timestamp from the snapshot.

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges for the resources used on this page, follow these steps.

Delete the VolumeSnapshot:
```
kubectl delete volumesnapshot example-snapshot
```
Note: If a volume snapshot's VolumeSnapshotClass has deletionPolicy:Delete, the corresponding VolumeSnapshotContent and the physical snapshot on the storage system are also deleted. If it has a deletionPolicy:Retain the underlying snapshot is retained.
Delete the temporary Pod:
```
kubectl delete -f restore-log.yaml
```
Delete the Pod:
```
kubectl delete -f snapshot-shell.yaml
```

Delete the PersistentVolumeClaim objects:

kubectl delete pvc example-pvc pvc-restore

What's next

Read the Kubernetes Volume Snapshot documentation.
Install additional CSI drivers.