Managing duplicate volume names

How duplicate volume names can occur

Data ONTAP does not support having two volumes with the same name on the same storage system. However, certain events can cause this to happen, as outlined in the following list:

You copy an aggregate using the aggr copy command, and when you bring the target aggregate online, there are one or more volumes on the destination system with the duplicated names.
You move an aggregate from one storage system to another by moving its associated disks, and there is another volume on the destination system with the same name as a volume contained by the aggregate you moved.
You move a traditional volume from one storage system to another by moving its associated disks, and there is another volume on the destination system with the same name.
Using SnapMover, you migrate a vFiler unit that contains a volume with the same name as a volume on the destination system.

How Data ONTAP handles duplicate volume names

When Data ONTAP senses a potential duplicate volume name, it appends the string "(d)" to the end of the name of the new volume, where d is a digit that makes the name unique.

For example, if you have a volume named vol1, and you copy a volume named vol1 from another storage system, the newly copied volume might be named vol1(1).

Duplicate volumes should be renamed as soon as possible

You might consider a volume name such as vol1(1) to be acceptable. However, it is important that you rename any volume with an appended digit as soon as possible, for the following reasons:

The name containing the appended digit is not guaranteed to persist across reboots. Renaming the volume will prevent the name of the volume from changing unexpectedly later on.
The parentheses characters, "(" and ")", are not legal characters for NFS. Any volume whose name contains those characters cannot be exported to NFS clients.
The parentheses characters could cause problems for client scripts.