Why does my EBS volume have a status of "error"?

Short description

The error status indicates that the underlying hardware related to your EBS volume has failed. The data associated with the volume is unrecoverable and Amazon EBS processes the volume as lost. A notification appears on your account's Personal Health Dashboard when a volume enters an error state.

Note: AWS doesn't bill for volumes with a status of error.

Resolution

It’s a best practice to keep backups of your EC2 resources, including EBS volumes. You can use Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager, AWS Backup, or regular EBS snapshots for maintaining regular backups of your critical volumes to avoid data loss. For more information, see Best practices for Amazon EC2.

Although you can't recover a volume in an error state, you can restore the lost data from your backup:

• If you have an EBS snapshot of the volume, you can restore that volume from your snapshot.
• If you don't have an EBS snapshot of the volume, create a new EBS volume, and then restore the data to it using the manual backup solution you prefer.

Note: If the volume in an error state is attached to an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), you might get an error when starting the instance.

Related information

Amazon EBS volumes

Durability and availability