How do I restore or rebuild my WorkSpace to resolve WorkSpaces Personal system errors?

Resolution

To resolve critical errors or failures with your WorkSpace, you can either restore or rebuild the WorkSpace. It's a best practice to first try to restore your WorkSpace.

Restore your WorkSpace

Prerequisites:

• The WorkSpace must be in either the AVAILABLE, ERROR, UNHEALTHY, or STOPPED state. You can't restore a WorkSpace in the REBOOTING state.
• You must have snapshots of both the root volume and user volume. WorkSpaces Personal takes initial snapshots within the first few hours of creation. To see the snapshot details, open the WorkSpaces console, select your WorkSpace, and then choose Snapshots.

When you restore a WorkSpace, WorkSpaces recreates both the root volume and user volume from the most recent healthy snapshot. Also, WorkSpaces displays the date and time of the most recent snapshots.

To restore your WorkSpace, follow the instructions in Restore a WorkSpace in WorkSpaces Personal. After you restore the WorkSpace, WorkSpaces Personal takes a snapshot of the restored WorkSpace.

Rebuild your WorkSpace

Prerequisites:

• The WorkSpace must be in either the AVAILABLE, ERROR, UNHEALTHY, or STOPPED state. If the status is REBOOTING, then you must use the RebuildWorkspaces API or rebuild-workspaces command in the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).
  Note: If you receive errors when you run AWS CLI commands, then see Troubleshoot AWS CLI errors. Also, make sure that you're using the most recent AWS CLI version.
• You have a snapshot of the user volume.

Important: When you rebuild a WorkSpace, you lose the applications that you installed and system settings that you changed after you created the WorkSpace.

WorkSpaces Personal takes automatic snapshots of the D drive every 12 hours. To keep the contents of your D drive, reboot the WorkSpace. Then, rebuild the WorkSpace after 12 hours. If you didn't save data on user volumes after the last snapshot was taken, then you can immediately rebuild the WorkSpace. When you rebuild a WorkSpace, your WorkSpace receives a new private IP address. WorkSpaces Personal also takes new snapshots of the rebuilt WorkSpace.

If you encounter issues when you try to rebuild the WorkSpace, then create an AWS Support case.

Related information

Administer WorkSpaces Personal