Preparing to copy a volume

Requirements for copying a volume

The filers involved in a volume copy operation must meet several requirements. The following list provides a brief description of these requirements. The rest of this section provides more detailed information about verifying whether the source and destination volumes meet these requirements.

The capacity of the destination volume must be greater than or equal to the capacity of the source volume.
The source and destination filers must have a trust relationship with each other.
The destination volume must exist, and must not be the root volume.
The source volume must be online and the destination volume must be restricted.
Remote Shell access must be enabled.
The destination volume must not contain data that you want to preserve.

Take care not to overwrite data that you need

If the destination volume is not a new volume, make sure that it does not contain data that you might need in the future. After Data ONTAP starts copying the source volume, it overwrites the entire destination volume. All data in the active file system and in the snapshots of the destination volume is lost after Data ONTAP starts copying the data.

Where volume copies can reside

The source and destination volumes of the copy can reside on the same filer or on different filers.

Recommendation for copying a volume

When a filer copies data between two volumes on separate filers, it floods the network between the two filers with packets. Users of the filers involved in a volume copy operation might notice a degradation in response time during the copy. To avoid network-related performance problems when copying to a different filer, Network Appliance recommends that you set up a private network for copying between the source and destination filers.

For detailed information

The following sections discuss the ways you prepare for copying a volume: