How to move a disk or snapshot to another Region? In my case I would want to move a disk or snapshot from East US to West US

Question

I am trying to move a disk or snapshot from the East US to the West US. I've made several attempts, including creating a snapshot of the disk and copying it to another region. I tried the incremental snapshot create and copy too, but failed also. Any hints or guidance would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Hello Robert Suarez,

Greetings! Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform.

There are two options for copying an incremental snapshot across regions. The first option, a managed process (recommended), that will perform the copy for you. This process is handled by Azure and removes the maintenance overhead of managing the copy process by staging a storage account in the target region. Azure ensures that only changes since the last snapshot in the target region are copied to the target region to reduce the data footprint, reducing the recovery point objective. You can check the process of a copy so you know when a target snapshot is ready to restore disks. For this managed process, you're only billed for the bandwidth cost of the data transfer across the region, and the read transactions on the source snapshot. Don't delete your source snapshot while the target snapshot is being copied.

The second option is a manual copy, where you get the changes between two incremental snapshots, down to the block level, and manually copy it from one region to another. Most users should use the managed process but, if you're interested in improving the copy speed, the second option allows you to use your compute resources to make the copy faster.

This article covers copying an incremental snapshot from one region to another. See Create an incremental snapshot for managed disks for conceptual details on incremental snapshots also refer here for more details with limitations.

Incremental snapshots for these disks are available in regions including East US and West US. However, Instant Restore capability is not yet generally available, so you need to wait for the background copy of data to complete before attaching the disk to a VM.

• [Create an incremental snapshot for Ultra and Premium SSD v2 disk](https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flearn.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fazure%2Fvirtual-machines%2Fdisks-incremental-snapshots%3Ftabs%3Dazure-cli%23incremental-snapshots-of-premium-ssd-v2-and-ultra-disks&data=05%7C01%7Cv-nehrujir%40microsoft.com%7C38a13540e17b4cfb14f308db7325b90d%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C638230379360084060%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=IyEMnCSLzO5NGlsyywMimYVTs6bKBk39F%2FORmLfrGpQ%3D&reserved=0"Original URL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-incremental-snapshots?tabs=azure-cli#incremental-snapshots-of-premium-ssd-v2-and-ultra-disks. Click or tap if you trust this link.")
• [Create an Ultra and Premium SSD v2 disk from a snapshot](https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Flearn.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fazure%2Fvirtual-machines%2Fscripts%2Fvirtual-machines-powershell-sample-create-managed-disk-from-snapshot&data=05%7C01%7Cv-nehrujir%40microsoft.com%7C38a13540e17b4cfb14f308db7325b90d%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C638230379360240260%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=GjdsQjfnsOoToOzjwRtEo6VqLxT%2Fz%2BCRwcwqJZoRBYY%3D&reserved=0"Original URL: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/scripts/virtual-machines-powershell-sample-create-managed-disk-from-snapshot. Click or tap if you trust this link.")

You can move the resources using below following ways,

1.Using Azure Resource Mover This tool helps move Azure resources, including VMs and related network/storage resources, between Azure regions.

2.If it's a managed disk, you can very easily use Azure Storage Explorer to move it to another region AND to another sub or tenant at the same time. Using copy and paste in Storage Explorer gives you a pop up to select the target region (on paste)

Also this is not using your computer bandwidth (so no download and upload again).

Hope the information helps! please let us know if you have any further queries with error details. I’m happy to assist you further.

---

Please "Accept the answer” and “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members.