3 hours ago
Hello Railway team,
I need to export existing media files from a persistent volume attached to a deliberately stopped service, without restarting the application or triggering a new deployment.
I am using Railway CLI 5.41.2 on the Hobby plan. An administrative query confirms deploymentStopped=true. One attempt to list the volume contents failed with exit code 1:
Failed to list / after reconnect
Failed to initialize SFTP session
Timeout
No files were downloaded and no configuration changes were made.
Could you confirm:
- Is read-only file access supported for a volume attached to a stopped deployment?
- If supported, which CLI or platform procedure should I use?
- Can this be performed without starting a container, restarting the service, or deploying another workload?
- What resource usage or additional charges, if any, would this operation incur?
- If offline access is unsupported, what is the least disruptive supported method for exporting the existing files while preventing the original application from running?
I need to preserve the existing volume contents and avoid any production changes or charges beyond my current plan. I am requesting documentation and guidance only; please do not perform any operational change as part of this inquiry.
Thank you.
1 Replies
3 hours ago
File access to a volume isn't available while the attached service has no active deployment. The CLI's volume file commands (railway volume files and railway volume browse) connect over SFTP through the service's running deployment, so with the deployment stopped there is nothing to connect to, which matches the SFTP timeout you saw. There is no offline or read-only mode that reads a stored volume without a container running.
Because of that, the supported path requires the service to run for the duration of the export: bring the service's deployment back up, download the files with those CLI commands, then stop the deployment again. The original application runs while it is up, since the volume is only reachable through that service. Pre-deploy commands don't mount the volume, so they can't be used to read it.
On cost, the volume already bills for storage whether or not the service is running. While the deployment is up, its CPU and memory usage is billed as normal usage on your Hobby plan, and that stops again once you stop the deployment.
Status changed to Awaiting User Response Railway • about 3 hours ago