Best Practices for File Gateway - Amazon Storage Gateway
Recovering your dataRestore data on Amazon FSxClean up unnecessary resources
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Best Practices for File Gateway

This section contains the following topics, which provide information about the best practices for working with gateways, file shares, buckets, and data. We recommend that you familiarize yourself with the information outlined in this section, and attempt to follow these guidelines in order to avoid problems with your Amazon Storage Gateway. For additional guidance on diagnosing and solving common issues you might encounter with your deployment, see Troubleshooting problems with your Storage Gateway deployment.

Best practices: recovering your data

Although it is rare, your gateway might encounter an unrecoverable failure. Such a failure can occur in your virtual machine (VM), the gateway itself, the local storage, or elsewhere. If a failure occurs, we recommend that you follow the instructions in the appropriate section following to recover your data.

Important

Storage Gateway doesn’t support recovering a gateway VM from a snapshot that is created by your hypervisor or from your Amazon EC2 Amazon Machine Image (AMI). If your gateway VM malfunctions, activate a new gateway and recover your data to that gateway using the instructions following.

Recovering from an unexpected virtual machine shutdown

If your VM shuts down unexpectedly, for example during a power outage, your gateway becomes unreachable. When power and network connectivity are restored, your gateway becomes reachable and starts to function normally. Following are some steps you can take at that point to help recover your data:

Recovering your data from a malfunctioning cache disk

If your cache disk encounters a failure, we recommend you use the following steps to recover your data depending on your situation:

  • If the malfunction occurred because a cache disk was removed from your host, shut down the gateway, re-add the disk, and restart the gateway.

Recovering your data from an inaccessible data center

If your gateway or data center becomes inaccessible for some reason, you can recover your data to another gateway in a different data center or recover to a gateway hosted on an Amazon EC2 instance. If you don't have access to another data center, we recommend creating the gateway on an Amazon EC2 instance. The steps you follow depends on the gateway type you are covering the data from.

To recover data from a File Gateway in an inaccessible data center

For File Gateway, you map a new file system to the FSx for Windows File Server that contains the data you want to recover.

  1. Create and activate a new File Gateway on an Amazon EC2 host. For more information, see Deploy a customized Amazon EC2 host for FSx File Gateway.

  2. Create a new file system on the EC2 gateway you created. For more information, see Create an FSx for Windows File Server file system.

  3. Mount your file system on your client and map it to the FSx for Windows File Server that contains the data that you want to recover. For more information, see Mount and use your file share.

Restoring from backups or snapshots directly on Amazon FSx

In some cases, you might need to restore data on your Amazon FSx file system directly, using a backup or snapshot from an earlier point in time. In these instances, there is a risk of creating a dual-writer scenario between the backup application and the FSx File Gateway, which can result in stuck or mis-matched files. To avoid problems when restoring your Amazon FSx file system from backups or snapshots, use the following procedure.

Note

Any cached data currently stored on your FSx File Gateway will not be valid after you restore your Amazon FSx file system from a backup or snapshot using this procedure.

To avoid problems when restoring your Amazon FSx file system from backups or snapshots

  1. Detach the Amazon FSx file system from the FSx File Gateway using the Storage Gateway console.

  2. Restore the backup or snapshot directly on your Amazon FSx file system.

  3. Reattach the Amazon FSx file system to the FSx File Gateway using the Storage Gateway console.

Clean up unnecessary resources

As a best practice, we recommend cleaning up Storage Gateway resources to avoid unexpected or unnecessary charges. For example, if you created a gateway as a demonstration exercise or a test, consider deleting it and its virtual appliance from your deployment. Use the following procedure to clean up resources.

To clean up resources you don't need

  1. If you no longer plan to continue using a gateway, delete it. For more information, see Deleting your gateway and removing associated resources.

  2. Delete the Storage Gateway VM from your on-premises host. If you created your gateway on an Amazon EC2 instance, terminate the instance.