Overview
While many tools exist for creating an image file from an Zadara Compute EBS Volume, the process in principle is relatively simple:
- take a Snapshot of the Volume
- clone a new Volume from the Snapshot
- attach the new Volume to a VM
- copy the data from the Volume to a file
- be careful to ensure you have enough space
- (optional) convert the newly created image file to another format
- be aware this may require even more space on your filesystem
Any application that can read from a block device and write to a file can be used. Most Operating Systems support such tools.
For example, if your system is running Linux, the most commonly used tools for this would be dd
. If you've cloned your source Volume and attached it to the VM as /dev/vdb
, you could run a command like this to copy it to a file (this is only an example, please consult the documentation for your tools of choice):
dd if=/dev/vdb of=example.img bs=1M status=progress
You may optionally want to convert this raw image to a format like qcow2
. On Linux, a popular tool for doing so is qemu-img
. Assuming you had enough space on your filesystem, you could run a command similar to this to convert your image (this is only an example, please consult the documentation for your tools of choice):
qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 -p /dev/vdb example.qcow2