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Retrieve Data from Persisted Storage Without Starting a Cluster

This procedure describes how to retrieve your persisted data from Amazon EC2®, without starting a cluster to access /shared/persisted. The major steps are described in the following subtopics:

Find Persisted Storage Resources in AWS

  1. Log in to the AWS® Management Console and access your Amazon EC2 Dashboard.

  2. On the right side of the tool bar at the top of the page, select the Region that your cluster is located in.

  3. In the left side navigation pane, select Elastic Block Store > Snapshots.

  4. Search for your snapshot:

    • In the Filter list, select Owned By Me.

    • In the Search Snapshots field, enter your cluster name from the Cloud Center.

    • Sort the Started column in descending order.

  5. In the lower half of the page, review the Tags for the top result in the list, and verify that the ClusterInfo value has the correct cluster name. For example, the result when your cluster name is MyR12b might look like this:

    MyR12b / first.last__AT__company.com / 4006224

  6. Select the snapshot with the correct ClusterInfo value and the most recent Started value. In the Description tab, copy the Snapshot ID (for example, snap-20cd6642) and note its Capacity value.

Launch Instance or Attach Volume to Existing Instance

Select one of these two options:

Option 1: Launch Ubuntu Instance

  1. On the EC2 Dashboard, click Launch Instance.

    For the next several steps, navigate using the numbered tabs at the top of the page.

  2. On the Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) tab, choose an Ubuntu AMI.

  3. On the Choose an Instance Type tab, select the hardware configuration and size of the instance to launch. Larger instance types have more CPU and memory. To minimize cost, select the t2.micro instance type if you are using VPC.

  4. On the Add Storage tab:

    • Click Add New Volume.

    • In the Type list, select EBS for Amazon Elastic Block Store.

    • In the Device list, select one of /dev/sd[f-p].

      For Linux®/UNIX® instances, recommended device names are /dev/sdf through /dev/sdp.

    • In the Snapshot field, enter the snapshot ID you copied earlier; for example, snap-20cd6642.

    • In the Size field, enter a value equal to the size of the snapshot; for example, 100 GiB.

  5. (optional) On the Tag Instance tab, give the instance a Name value so you can more easily find the instance in the Amazon Management Console.

  6. On the Configure Security Group tab, use a security group to define firewall rules for your instance. These rules specify which incoming network traffic is delivered to your instance. All other traffic is ignored.

    • In the Type list, select SSH.

    • In the Source list, select My IP.

  7. On the Review Instance Launch tab, check the details of your instance, and make any necessary changes by clicking the appropriate Edit link. When all settings are correct, click Launch.

  8. In the Select an existing key pair or create a new key pair dialog box, make your preference. For example, select Choose an existing key pair, then in the Select the key pair list, choose a key pair that you have access to. This is the key pair you will use later to connect to the instance for mounting the volume and transferring data.

  9. After you launch the instance, wait for the instance state to become Running. You can view this information in the EC2 Dashboard by navigating to Instances > Instances

For more information on Instance Types, see
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-types.html.

For more information on AWS Block Device Mapping, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/block-device-mapping-concepts.html.

Option 2: Attach Volume to Existing Ubuntu Instance

The Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volume and the instance must be located in the same Availability Zone.

  1. In the left-side navigation pane of the EC2 Dashboard, select Elastic Block Store > Snapshots.

  2. Select your snapshot.

  3. Create a volume from your snapshot:

    1. Click Actions > Create Volume.

    2. Set the Availability Zone to match that of your instance. You can accept the defaults for the other settings.

    3. A confirmation indicates that the volume was successfully created. Note the volume ID, for example, vol-8a9d6642).

    Wait until the state of your volume is Available.

  4. In the left-side navigation pane of the EC2 Dashboard, select Elastic Block Store > Volumes.

  5. Select the volume you created in step 3.

  6. Click Actions > Attach Volume.

  7. In the Attach Volume dialog box:

    • In the Instance field, enter the ID of the instance to attach the volume to.

    • In the Device field, enter something in the range of /dev/sd[f-p]. For Linux/UNIX instances, recommended device names are /dev/sdf through /dev/sdp.

    • Click Attach to attach the volume to the instance.

For more information on AWS Block Device Mapping, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/block-device-mapping-concepts.html.

For more information on EBS volumes, see
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-restoring-volume.html.

Mount Volume for Access

Make the volume available for use from the instance.

  1. Connect to your instance using SSH.

  2. Use the lsblk command to view your available disk devices and their mount points to help you determine the correct device name to use. (Most likely xvdf.) Note: Do not create a new file system.

  3. Create a mount point directory for the volume. The mount point is where the volume is located in the file system tree and where you read and write files to after you mount the volume. Substitute a location for mount_point, such as /data.

    ~$ sudo mkdir mount_point

  4. Use the following command to mount the volume at the location you just created.

    $ sudo mount device_name mount_point

    For example,

    $ sudo mount /dev/xvdf /data

For more information on using EBS volumes, see
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ebs-using-volumes.html.

Transfer Data

You can now transfer data between the mounted volume and your local drive, as described in Transfer Data with Standard Utilities.

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