How to reduce the size of a VM disk
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Updated at December 17, 2025
Case description
You need to decrease the size of a disk, snapshot, or image on your Compute Cloud VM.
Solution
Due to certain specifics of the Yandex Cloud architecture, you can only expand the disk size. For more information about this, see the relevant guide.
To reduce the boot disk size on your VM, you will need to recreate the VM with the required disk size.
Warning
You cannot use a snapshot to create a disk that is smaller than its parent disk.
If you need to reduce the size of data disks in your VM, you can do the following:
- Create an empty disk of the required size.
- Without recreating the VM, transfer data from your old disk to the new one.
- Remove the old disk after you are done migrating your data.
You can also store your data in Object Storage. Use FUSE and GeeseFS to mount your bucket as a folder.