Persistent Disks

Preserve your service's filesystem changes across deploys.

You can attach a persistent disk to a paid Render web service, private service, or background worker. This enables you to preserve local filesystem changes across deploys and restarts.

By default, Render services have an ephemeral filesystem.

This means that without a persistent disk, any changes you make to a service's local files are lost every time the service redeploys or restarts.

Persistent disks are useful for services such as:

Infrastructure components (Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)
A blogging platform or CMS (WordPress, Ghost, Strapi, etc.)
Collaboration apps (Mattermost, GitLab, Discourse, etc.)
Custom datastores (MySQL, MongoDB, etc.)
- Note that Render offers managed Postgres (relational database) and Key Value instances. If one of these services suits your needs, we recommend using it instead of setting up your own with a persistent disk.

Persistent disks use the same high-performance SSDs as Render Postgres and Key Value instances. All disks are encrypted at rest, and so are their automatic daily snapshots.

Setup

Before you attach a persistent disk, it's helpful to understand important limitations and considerations.

You create a persistent disk from the Render Dashboard. You can do so during service creation (click Advanced at the bottom of the creation form), or any time after creation from your service's Disk page:

$Adding a persistent disk in the Render Dashboard$

Set your disk's mount path.
- Only filesystem changes under this path are preserved across deploys and restarts! The rest of your service's filesystem remains ephemeral.
- For more details, see Mount path.
Choose a disk size.
- You can increase your disk's size later, but you can't decrease it. Pick the smallest value that currently works for your service.
Click Add disk.

After you save, Render triggers a new deploy for your service. The disk becomes available as soon as the deploy is live.

Mount path

When you attach a persistent disk to a service, you specify its absolute mount path. Only data written under this path is preserved across deploys and restarts.