Deleting an Amazon EBS volume - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Deleting an Amazon EBS volume

After you no longer need an Amazon EBS volume, you can delete it. After deletion, its data is gone and the volume can't be attached to any instance. However, before deletion, you can store a snapshot of the volume, which you can use to re-create the volume later.

Note

You can't delete a volume if it's attached to an instance. To delete a volume, you must first detach it. For more information, see Detaching an Amazon EBS volume from a Linux instance.

You can check if a volume is attached to an instance. In the console, on the Volumes page, you can view the state of your volumes.

  • If a volume is attached to an instance, it’s in the in-use state.

  • If a volume is detached from an instance, it’s in the available state. You can delete this volume.

To delete an EBS volume using the console

  1. Open the Amazon EC2 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/.

  2. In the navigation pane, choose Volumes.

  3. Select a volume and choose Actions, Delete Volume. If Delete Volume is greyed out, the volume is attached to an instance.

  4. In the confirmation dialog box, choose Yes, Delete.

To delete an EBS volume using the command line

You can use one of the following commands. For more information about these command line interfaces, see Accessing Amazon EC2.