Best practices for Tape Gateway - AWS Storage Gateway
Best practices: recovering your dataCleaning up unecessary resources

Best practices for Tape Gateway

This section contains the following topics, which provide information about the best practices for working with gateways, local disks, snapshots, 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 AWS Storage Gateway. For additional guidance on diagnosing and solving common issues you might encounter with your deployment, see Troubleshooting your gateway.

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:

  • If an outage causes network connectivity issues, you can troubleshoot the issue. For information about how to test network connectivity, see Testing your gateway connection to the internet.

  • For tapes setups, when your gateway becomes reachable, your tapes go into BOOTSTRAPPING status. This functionality ensures that your locally stored data continues to be synchronized with AWS. For more information on this status, see Understanding Tape Status.

  • If your gateway malfunctions and issues occur with your volumes or tapes as a result of an unexpected shutdown, you can recover your data. For information about how to recover your data, see the sections following that apply to your scenario.

Recovering your data from a malfunctioning gateway or VM

If your Tape Gateway or the hypervisor host encounters an unrecoverable failure, you can use the following steps to recover the tapes from the malfunctioning Tape Gateway to another Tape Gateway:

  1. Identify the Tape Gateway that you want to use as the recovery target, or create a new one.

  2. Deactivate the malfunctioning gateway.

  3. Create recovery tapes for each tape that you want to recover and specify the target Tape Gateway.

  4. Delete the malfunctioning Tape Gateway.

For detailed information on how to recover the tapes from a malfunctioning Tape Gateway to another Tape Gateway, see You Need to Recover a Virtual Tape from a Malfunctioning Tape Gateway.

Recovering your data from an irrecoverable tape

If your tape encounters a failure and the status of the tape is IRRECOVERABLE, we recommend you use one of the following options to recover your data or resolve the failure depending on your situation:

  • If you need the data on the irrecoverable tape, you can recover the tape to a new gateway.

  • If you don't need the data on the tape, and the tape has never been archived, you can simply delete the tape from your Tape Gateway.

    For detailed information about how to recover your data or resolve the failure if your tape is IRRECOVERABLE, see Troubleshooting Irrecoverable Tapes.

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.

  • If the cache disk is corrupted or not accessible, shut down the gateway, reset the cache disk, reconfigure the disk for cache storage, and restart the gateway.

For detailed information, see You Need to Recover a Virtual Tape from a Malfunctioning Cache Disk.

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 Tape Gateway in an inaccessible data center

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

  2. Recover the tapes from the source gateway in the data center to the new gateway you created on Amazon EC2 For more information, see Recovering a Virtual Tape From An Unrecoverable Gateway.

    Your tapes should be covered to the new Amazon EC2 gateway.

Cleaning up unecessary resources

If you created the gateway as an example exercise or a test, consider cleaning up to avoid incurring unexpected or unnecessary charges.

If you plan to continue using your Tape Gateway, see additional information in Where do I go from here?

To clean up resources you don't need

  1. Delete tapes from both your gateway's virtual tape library (VTL) and archive. For more information, see Deleting your gateway and removing associated resources.

    1. Archive any tapes that have the RETRIEVED status in your gateway's VTL. For instructions, see Archiving Tapes.

    2. Delete any remaining tapes from your gateway's VTL. For instructions, see Deleting virtual tapes from your Tape Gateway.

    3. Delete any tapes you have in the archive. For instructions, see Deleting virtual tapes from your Tape Gateway.

  2. Unless you plan to continue using the Tape Gateway, delete it: For instructions, see Deleting your gateway and removing associated resources.

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