Removing a volume: steps to move files back to droplet, remove symbolic link and delete volume

Greetings!

I can kind of get you there a bit, but some pieces are relative and you’ll need to consider how they impact you because they might be just a little wrong. Where I’m failing the most, which may cause me to be wrong, is drawing correlation between /mnt/db-volume-01 and /mysql. If the additional volume is mounted at /mnt/db-volume-01 and the databases are symlinked from /mysql, then I assume the databases are not on the additional volume. So for my purposes here, I’m going to just make an assumption that the databases are at /mnt/db-volume-01/mysql and work accordingly.

Under my assumption, this is what I’d do:

1. Take a snapshot of the droplet. This is your restore point should anything go wrong.
2. Run these commands:

service mysql stop && systemctl stop mysql #Covers init and systemd, if one fails no issue.
unlink /var/lib/mysql
cp -R /mnt/db-volume-01/mysql /var/lib
service mysql start && systemctl start mysql
umount /mnt/db-volume-01

3. Look in /etc/fstab to make sure the volume isn’t listed, remove if it is.

This is mildly dangerous and may fail, restoring droplet backup should undo the failure.

Jarland