Persistent Disks

You can attach a persistent disk to a paid Render web service, private service, or background worker. This enables you to preserve local filesystem changes across deploys and restarts.

Persistent disks are useful for services such as:

• Infrastructure components (Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)
• A blogging platform or CMS (WordPress, Ghost, Strapi, etc.)
• Collaboration apps (Mattermost, GitLab, Discourse, etc.)
• Custom datastores (MySQL, MongoDB, etc.)
  • Note that Render offers managed Postgres (relational database) and Key Value instances. If one of these services suits your needs, we recommend using it instead of setting up your own with a persistent disk.

Persistent disks use the same high-performance SSDs as Render Postgres and Key Value instances. All disks are encrypted at rest, and so are their automatic daily snapshots.

Setup

You create persistent disks from the Render Dashboard. You can do so during service creation (click Advanced at the bottom of the creation form), or any time after creation from your service's Disks page:

1. Set your disk's mount path (such as /var/data).
   • Only filesystem changes under this path are preserved across deploys and restarts! The rest of your service's filesystem remains ephemeral.
2. Choose a disk size.
   • You can increase your disk's size later, but you can't decrease it. Pick the smallest value that currently works for your service.
3. Click Add disk.

After you save, Render triggers a new deploy for your service. The disk becomes available as soon as the deploy is live.

Monitoring usage

View your disk's usage over time from your service's Disks page in the Render Dashboard:

Disk snapshots

Render automatically creates a snapshot of your persistent disk once every 24 hours. If your disk experiences critical data loss or corruption, you can completely restore its state to any available snapshot. Snapshots are available for at least seven days after they're created.

Restore a snapshot from your service's Disks page in the Render Dashboard:

Restoring a custom database

If you use a persistent disk specifically to back a custom database instance on Render (such as MySQL or MongoDB), do not perform a disk restore for database recovery purposes. If you do, your database might restore to a corrupted state.

Instead, create regular backups of your database using a tool like mysqldump for MySQL or mongodump for MongoDB. Restore your database's state using one of these backups.

Transferring files

You can securely transfer files between your disk-backed service and your local machine using a tool like SCP or Magic-Wormhole.

SCP

After you set up SSH for your service, you can transfer files using SCP.

For example, if your ssh command looks like this:

$ ssh YOUR_SERVICE@ssh.YOUR_REGION.render.com

Then your scp commands look like this:

# Copying a file from your service to your local machine
$ scp -s YOUR_SERVICE@ssh.YOUR_REGION.render.com:/path/to/remote/file /destination/path/for/local/file 
file        100% 5930KB 999.9KB/s   00:05

# Copying a file from your local machine to your service
$ scp -s /path/to/local/file YOUR_SERVICE@ssh.YOUR_REGION.render.com:/destination/path/for/remote/file 
file        100% 5930KB 999.9KB/s   00:05

Magic-Wormhole

The Magic-Wormhole library enables you to transfer files to and from your disk-backed service without using SSH and SCP.

1. In the Render Dashboard, go to your service's Shell page.

2. If you have a Docker-image-backed service, use the shell to install magic-wormhole:

   • Run apt update && apt install magic-wormhole or the equivalent for your environment.
   • The magic-wormhole library is pre-installed on all Render native runtimes.

3. Use the shell to transfer your file with the wormhole command:

   shell

   $ wormhole send /path/to/filename.txt 
   Sending 10.5 MB file named 'filename.txt'
   Wormhole code is: 4-forever-regain

4. Note the code that appears in the output from wormhole. Then, from any internet-connected machine, install magic-wormhole and run wormhole receive, entering in the code when prompted.

Disk limitations and considerations

When attaching a persistent disk to your service, note the following:

• Only filesystem changes under your disk's mount path are preserved across deploys and restarts.

  • The rest of your service's filesystem remains ephemeral.

• A persistent disk is accessible by only a single service instance, and only at runtime. This means:

  • You can't access a service's disk from any other service.

  • You can't scale a service to multiple instances if it has a disk attached.

  • You can't access persistent disks during a service's build command or pre-deploy command (these commands run on separate compute).

  • You can't access a service's disk from a one-off job you run for the service (one-off jobs run on separate compute).

• Adding a disk to a service prevents zero-downtime deploys. This is because:

  • When you redeploy your service, Render stops the existing instance before bringing up the new instance.

  • This instance swap takes a few seconds, during which your service is unavailable.

  • This is a necessary safeguard to prevent data corruption that can occur when different versions of an app read and write to the same disk simultaneously.

• You can't add a disk to a cron job service.

  • As an alternative, you can add a disk to a background worker, which is useful for processes that run continuously and don’t expose a port.

• You can increase your disk's size later, but you can't decrease it. Pick the smallest value that currently works for your service.

  • Increasing a disk's size does not cause downtime. The additional storage becomes available to your service within a few seconds.