Amazon FSx File Gateway is no longer available to new customers. Existing customers of FSx File Gateway can continue to use the service normally. For capabilities similar to FSx File Gateway, visit this blog post.

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 AWS 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.

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:

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.

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.

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.