Volume Quickstart

Add New Volumes to Droplets

You can add a new volume to an existing Droplet or while creating a new Droplet.

1. In the top-right of the DigitalOcean Control Panel, click Create, then select Volume Block Storage. In the Add a volume window, under Select Volume Size, select a size for your volume. You can enter a custom size or choose a fixed size: 100 GB, 500 GB, or 1000 GB.

2. Under Select Droplet to Attach to, select an existing Droplet to attach your new volume to. If you haven’t created a Droplet yet, you can create a Droplet with a new volume in the Additional Storage section, and then click Add Volume.

3. Under Name Volume, choose a name for your new volume or use the autogenerated volume name.

4. Under Choose Configuration Options, choose how to format and mount the volume. You can automatically format and mount, which applies default settings and mounts the volume, or manually format and mount, which attaches the volume so you can format and mount it yourself over SSH.

   If you choose to automatically format and mount your volume, select a filesystem appropriate for your use case:

   • Ext4 (recommended): General-purpose workloads due to its broad compatibility and reliability.
   • XFS: Large filesystems or write-heavy workloads where higher scalability is beneficial.

   Automatic and manual setup both format the volume with ext4, mount it into /mnt with the options defaults,nofail,discard,noatime, and update /etc/fstab for persistent mounting across reboots.

5. Click Create Volume to create your new volume. Volumes are created in the same region and project as the Droplet they are attached to. Your new volume appears on the Volumes page.

Move Volumes to Different Droplets

You can move volumes between different Droplets in the same datacenter.

1. Unmount the volume to prevent OS-level errors.
2. On the Volumes page, find the volume you want to move. Click More, then click Detach from Droplet, and in the confirmation window, click Confirm.
3. In the same More menu, click Attach to Droplet, and under the Droplet column, enter the name of the new Droplet.
4. Mount the volume to make it accessible to the new Droplet.

Increase the Size of Volumes

If you need more storage space, you can increase the size of a volume.

1. On the Volumes page, find the volume you want to resize. On its right, click More, then click Increase size to open the Increase volume size window.
2. Select or enter a new size that is at least 1 GB larger than the current volume. This change is irreversible.

3. After choosing a new size, click Resize volume.
4. Expand the filesystem to use the additional space. For Ext4, use resize2fs. For XFS, use xfs_growfs.

Volumes are unpartitioned by default. If you manually partitioned your volume when creating it, you must expand the final partition before expanding the filesystem.

You cannot decrease the size of a volume because of the risk of data loss and filesystem corruption.

Delete Volumes

Deleting a volume permanently and irreversibly destroys the volume and its contents.

1. On the Volumes page, next to the volume you want to delete, click More, then click Delete.
2. In the confirmation window, click Confirm to delete the volume.