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