Reducing the Amount of Billed Storage on a Volume

Deleting files from your file system doesn't necessarily delete data from the underlying block device or reduce the amount of data stored on your volume. If you want to reduce the amount of billed storage on your volume, we recommend overwriting your files with zeros to compress the storage to a negligible amount of actual storage. Storage Gateway charges for volume usage based on compressed storage.

Note

If you use a delete tool that overwrites the data on your volume with random data, your usage will not be reduced. This is because the random data is not compressible.