fly volume has vanished and snapshots are unavailable

[scytale]

$ fly volumes list
ID                      STATE   NAME                    SIZE    REGION  ZONE    ENCRYPTED       ATTACHED VM      CREATED AT
vol_6vjd126jxq8jlqmv*   created huma******              2GB     lhr     b6a7    true                             5 months ago

These volumes hosts could not be reached.

$ fly volumes snapshots list vol_6vjd126jxq8jlqmv
No snapshots available for volume vol_6vjd126jxq8jlqmv
✔

Is there any way to get my data back?

[john-fly]

Hi scytale,

Yes, that host has suffered a hardware failure and is unavailable. This hardware failure should not be irreparable though, and we are currently in the middle of repairing it. You will get your data back when the host comes back online.

There’s also an important point that we try to repeat as often as we can on the CLI and in the Docs, but that we may need to emphasize yet more strongly. We view Fly Volumes as persistent storage, but not durable long-term storage; as we say in the docs :

Create and store backups: If you only have a single copy of your data on a single volume, and that drive fails, then the data is lost. Fly.io takes daily snapshots and retains them for 5 days, but the snapshots shouldn’t be your primary backup method.

But if that comes as a surprise to you, then we didn’t succeed in setting your expectations about the platform correctly, and that’s something we should be better about.

[scytale]

I was actually aware of the need to make my own backups. I just didn’t.

Hopefully the host comes back online at some stage and I swear this time I’ve learned my lesson and will faithfully back up.

Thanks for the quick reply.