Troubleshooting Block Storage for VPC snapshots
When you create or manage Snapshots for VPC, you might encounter issues. Often, you can recover by following a few steps. Issues, symptoms, likely causes, and resolutions are described in the following sections.
Degraded performance during the restoration of a volume from a snapshot
When you restore a volume from a snapshot, while the data downloads, the API health_state and health_reasons properties indicate that the snapshot is being initialized. Performance is degraded while the volume is being
initialized from the snapshot. This performance impact applies to snapshots of unattached volumes and snapshots of volumes that are attached to an instance.
The data for the snapshot is stored in IBM Cloud® Object Storage. After the volume is created, the data is downloaded from Object Storage bucket to the availability zone where the volume is being created. Depending on the snapshot size, the
download can take several minutes, at which time some of the data blocks are read or written directly from Object Storage, but not all data. You might experience less IOPS and bandwidth than what you'd expect when you create a regular volume.
The health state show as degraded with health reason initializing_from_snapshot.
Wait until the data is fully downloaded from Object Storage to the volume. When the data is fully downloaded, you can expect the normal provisioned IOPS and bandwidth for the volume.
Restoring a volume from a snapshot fails
A fully restored volume was not created from the snapshot. The API health status shows degraded, with the health reason initializing_from_snapshot and a message indicates that initializing from the snapshot failed.
Some or all of the data was not downloaded from Object Storage to the volume that's being created. Data blocks were not written.
Contact IBM support to determine the root cause of the failure and resolve the problem.
A snapshot of a volume is in an unusable state during volume restoration
The snapshot is in an unusable state and the data can't be restored from the snapshot. In this case, the health state is faulted. You can see the API health reason initializing_from_snapshot and a message that the snapshot is in
an unusable state.
The data was not downloaded from Object Storage when you tried to restore a volume because the snapshot is not available. A possible cause is that the customer root key for the snapshot was disabled or deleted.
You can enable a root key or restore a root key within 30 days of deletion. Restoring the root key makes the snapshot available. For other issues, contact IBM support to determine the root cause of the failure and fix the problem.