Note: Virtual disks are a feature only used by Marketplace apps (Docker, datastores, WordPress etc…). App created from code (NodeJS, PHP etc…) uses an immutable file system and cannot use the Virtual Disk feature.
Virtual Disks, aka persistent data, are NVMe (high IOPS) storage disks used to store data that is not part of your build and that you need to keep between restarts or new builds of your application. Every app gets 50GB of free disk space.
Note that all data inside a container gets wiped out each time your application restarts. So if your app collects data from users, like photos and other media, and doesn’t use an external storage solution, like Amazon S3, a virtual disk is required to keep the data persistent.
Another use for Virtual Disks is to store and keep logs between apps builds or restarts for further download and analysis. You can attach a virtual disk with the path /var/log to your application and collect the logs later. Make sure to clean up this disk regularly to avoid using more than the free allowed space and getting charged for it.
To access any virtual disk an application “File Browser” is available from the Marketplace and can attach to any disk inside the same stack.
Virtual Disks backups are completed every day between 3AM and 6AM UTC time. The backups get carried out with ransomware mitigation, and you have access to it for the next 10 days after the backup is complete.
The daily backups are free, no matter the size of your disk.
Each ‘instance’ type includes free disk space but, the ephemeral disk space used by the container itself (build image, temporary data, logs) is not within this limit but gets whipped out every time the app restart and at least once a day.
Each app gets 50GB of free virtual disk space. Each additional GB used is billed at $0.016/GB/hour which is approximately $0.50/GB/month.
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