Understanding high availability and disaster recovery for Cloud Shell

As an IBM Cloud® platform service, IBM® Cloud Shell follows the practices that are described in How IBM Cloud ensures high availability and disaster recovery, with the exception that IBM Cloud Shell is regionally available rather than globally available. Because Cloud Shell is region-dependent, automated global failover isn't supported. You should always maintain a backup of your data outside of Cloud Shell.

The Tokyo region for Cloud Shell is deprecated and will no longer be supported by Cloud Shell as of 2 July 2024. For more information, see the release notes.

IBM Cloud Shell is available in the Dallas (us-south), Frankfurt (eu-de), and Tokyo (jp-tok) regions, and each location has three different data centers for redundancy. The data for each location is kept in the data centers near that location. If all the data centers in a location or region fail, IBM Cloud Shell becomes unavailable in that location or region. When this happens, you can change to another location or region as described in Changing locations.

For more information, see How IBM Cloud ensures high availability and disaster recovery.

Backing up your data

Your Cloud Shell workspace storage is temporary, and it's not intended to be used as the primary storage location for your files. Don't store business-critical or sensitive data in your workspace, and create a backup of your files outside of IBM Cloud Shell. You're responsible for your data, and your backup can help you recover in case an outage or data loss occurs for any reason. For more information about how to transfer files to create a backup, see Transferring multiple files.

What to do if a region is not available

If a region is not available, Cloud Shell indicates that the current region or location is not available. Files and data from that region are not available unless you manually restore them from a previous backup.

To select an available region and manually restore your data and files, complete these steps:

In Cloud Shell, find the current location in the Cloud Shell menu bar, and click Change.
Select the location that you want to switch to, and click OK. For more information, see Changing locations.
Upload the previously backed-up files and data into the new region or location. For more information, see Uploading files.