Render Disks

Render Persistent Disks

Persistent disks are high-performance SSDs you attach to a Render service to preserve filesystem changes across deploys and restarts. Without a disk, services have an ephemeral filesystem—all local file changes are lost on every deploy.

When to Use

• Storing file uploads, CMS media, or user-generated content
• Running a self-managed database (MySQL, MongoDB, ClickHouse) on Render
• Deploying stateful infrastructure (Elasticsearch, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Mattermost)
• Understanding why scaling is blocked or zero-downtime deploys are disabled
• Restoring data from an automatic disk snapshot

For managed databases, prefer Render Postgres (render-postgres) or Key Value (render-keyvalue) over self-managed alternatives on disk.

Critical Constraints

These constraints affect architecture decisions. Understand them before attaching a disk:

Setup

Dashboard

1. Go to your service's Disks page
2. Set the mount path (absolute path where persistent data is stored)
3. Choose a size in GB
4. Click Add disk — triggers a new deploy

Blueprint

services:  - type: web    name: cms    runtime: node    plan: starter    region: oregon    buildCommand: npm ci && npm run build    startCommand: npm start    disk:      name: cms-data      mountPath: /var/data      sizeGB: 10

Mount Path

Only files written under the mount path are preserved. Everything else remains ephemeral.

Disallowed mount paths

Cannot mount at: /, /opt, /opt/render, /opt/render/project, /opt/render/project/src, /home, /home/render, /etc, /etc/secrets.

Subdirectories of these paths are fine (e.g. /opt/render/project/src/uploads).

Snapshots

• Render creates an automatic snapshot every 24 hours
• Snapshots are available for at least 7 days
• Restore from the service's Disks page in the Dashboard
• Full restore only — you cannot restore individual files
• Destructive — all changes after the snapshot are lost

Do not restore snapshots for custom database recovery. Use database-native backup tools (mysqldump, mongodump) instead—disk snapshots may capture a corrupted database state.

File Transfers

SCP (via SSH)

# Download from servicescp -s [email protected]_REGION.render.com:/mount/path/file ./local-file
# Upload to servicescp -s ./local-file [email protected]_REGION.render.com:/mount/path/file

Requires SSH access enabled for the service.

Magic-Wormhole

Available on all native runtimes (install manually on Docker):

# On the service shellwormhole send /mount/path/file
# On your local machinewormhole receive

Common Patterns

Common Mistakes

References

Related Skills

• render-web-services — Deploy lifecycle, health checks (disk disables zero-downtime)
• render-private-services — Internal services with disks (Elasticsearch, MySQL)
• render-blueprints — disk field reference in render.yaml
• render-postgres — Managed database alternative (no disk management needed)