Preparing to copy a volume

Requirements for copying a volume

The storage systems 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 source and destination volumes must be of the same type: either both traditional or both FlexVol volumes.
The capacity of the destination volume must be greater than or equal to the capacity of the source volume.
The source and destination storage systems 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 Snapshot copies 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 or on different storage systems.

Recommendation for copying a volume

When a storage system copies data between two volumes on separate systems, it floods the network between the two systems with packets. Users of the systems involved in a volume copy operation might notice a degradation in response time during the copy. A private network for copying between the source and destination storage systems helps circumvent network-related performance problems when copying to a different system.

For detailed information

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