By default, Docker containers are entirely stateless. The data stored on the container is ephemeral, and will be wiped when the container shuts down. This is obviously not ideal for many applications, so Docker provides a few ways of dealing with state.
What Are Volumes?
The simplest way of making Docker data persistent is bind mounts, which literally bind a location on the host’s disk to a location on the container’s disk. These are simple to create and use, but are a little janky as you need to set up the directories and manage them yourself.
Volumes are like virtual hard drives managed by Docker. Docker handles storing them on disk (usually in /var/lib/docker/volumes/), and gives them an easily memorable single name rather than a directory path. It’s easy to create and remove them using the Docker CLI.
These have a few other benefits besides being managed by Docker. They work on both Linux and Windows containers, they can more safely shared among multiple containers, and the volume drivers allow cloud providers to provide remote hosting for the underlying data. Overall, volumes are easier to use than bind mounts, and are recommended by Docker for managing state.
How Do You Use Them?
You can create a new volume from the command line with the following command:
And then, when you go to run your Docker container, link it to the target in the container with the –mount flag:
If you run docker inspect
If you’re using Docker Compose, the setup is easy as well. Simply add a volumes entry for each container service you have, then map a volume name to a location in the guest. You’ll also need to provide a list of volumes in a top-level volumes key for Compose to provision.
This will create the volume automatically for this Compose. If you’d like to use a premade volume from outside Compose, specify external: true in the volume configuration:
If you’d like to instead simply do a bind mount and not bother with volumes, simply enter in a path name in place of the volume name, and forego defining the volume names.
You can read Docker’s full documentation on using volumes with Compose if your use case requires something more specific than this.
Transfering Docker Volumes
Docker volumes are just folders created automatically and stored at /var/lib/docker/volumes/, with each volume being stored under ./volumename/_data/. To back up and restore, you can simply backup these volumes directly.
If you’d instead like to use the Docker CLI, they don’t provide an easy way to do this unfortunately. To back up a container’s volumes, you’ll need the container name, as well as the mount location that the data is stored in.
The way to do it is a bit of a hack—you’ll need to run a command in a new Docker container, bind mount the current shell directory, mount the volume to that container, then tar the directory into a backup. You’ll end up with a backup.tar of the volume:
Then, similarly, you can extract the archive in the target directory:
This is still better than having to know the host location though, so you can automate this if you want to.
