Block Storage Snapshots for VPC is a cost-effective regional offering that is used to create and store point-in-time copies of your IBM Block Storage for VPC boot or data volumes.

With cross-region snapshot copy, you can now copy a snapshot from one region to any other region of your choice and later use that snapshot to restore to a volume in the new region. This feature can be used in disaster recovery, application migration and geographic expansion scenarios, when you need to bring up your virtual server instance and data volumes in a different region. You can also use the remote copy to create storage volumes in a new region to expand your VPC.

This new feature is fully integrated with the IBM Cloud Backup for VPC service, which allows you to back up your snapshots by a schedule.

How to copy a snapshot across regions

Copying your VPC block snapshots to another region is easy, you can create and manage cross-region snapshot copies in the UI, from the CLI, with the API or with Terraform. The following steps will show you how to copy a snapshot across regions and how to restore to a new volume in another region within the IBM Cloud console:

1. Within the VPC Infrastructure section in the IBM Cloud console, access the Block storage snapshots subsection and select the snapshot you want to copy to a different region:

2. On the Remote copies panel, click on Create copy +:

3. Name your snapshot copy, select the region where you want your snapshot to be copied, set all your values, and click Create. In this example, I am copying a snapshot that exists in the Dallas region to the Washington, DC region:

4. Once created, you should be able to see the copy on the Remote copies panel:

5. To restore the snapshot to the secondary region, you simply need to select the copy from the Remote copies panel. This action will open the details page for the snapshot copy. Then, click on the Actions button and click on Create volume (5a). This will bring up a new panel on the right-hand side that will allow you to restore to a new volume (5b):

5a.

5b.

6. Click on Save, and a new volume from your snapshot will be created. Your new volume will be available on the Block storage volumes subsection:

Billing

Creating cross-region copies affects billing. You are charged for the data transferred (gigabytes transmitted) and the storage consumption (snapshot space in gigabytes) in the target region separately as follows:

• Data transferred: $0.02/GB/mo*
• Snapshot space: $0.0523/GB/mo**

*Data transferred price is the same in all target regions.

**Snapshot space price in US MZRs, pricing may vary per region.

Learn more

For more information about IBM Cloud Block Storage Snapshots for VPC see the Snapshots for VPC documentation.