Volume storage is much like an external hard drive or storage device, which can be attached and detached to your instances. We offer this in HDD and SSD varieties. For persistent, important data we highly recommend using a Volume. This is separate from the instance OS so any corruption on the instance and ephemeral storage would not effect the volume data. This data can be attached to a new instance to recover data in case of OS corruption.

Initially after created the block storage device you will need to format the storage to be usable by an OS. Feel free to follow along with the following steps:

First go to the Volumes tab in your AURO Dashboard and click on Create Volume


Then, a window will popup to create the volume. Simply add a volume name and description if you wish. Volume Source has a dropdown list of instance images and snapshots you may use to setup this Volume as a bootable OS, or simply an empty volume to use as storage.

The type you may leave as the default option. Then choose your required size in GB, and the availability zone is either plain storage (nova) or SSD (van1-ssd-1).

Once complete you will be able to see the volume. Now on the left click on the dropdown and choose "Edit Attachments" to attach this volume to an instance.

A new window will come up. On the bottom choose the instance to attach this to, and click "ATTACH VOLUME".

You will now see the instance name and what the instance will see the block storage directory as. By default this will be in /dev/vdb.

Now you will need to SSH into your instance and format the drive to be usable. Verify the drive name by typing: lsblk

ubuntu@instance1:~$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
vda    253:0    0  20G  0 disk 
└─vda1 253:1    0  20G  0 part /
vdb    253:16   0  50G  0 disk 

Now format the drive in your preferred filesystem. The most common for this is ext4:

ubuntu@instance1:~$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdb
Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

Next create a file directory to mount the volume to:

ubuntu@instance1:~$ sudo mkdir /mnt/vol1

Finally, mount the volume to the new directory:

ubuntu@instance1:~$ sudo mount /dev/vdb /mnt/vol1

Now you may use this block storage on your instance!