# Neo4j community edition on AWS additional storage options **URL:** \ **Category:** Aura & Cloud\ **Created:** [February 9, 2019, 9:49am UTC](https://community.neo4j.com/t/neo4j-community-edition-on-aws-additional-storage-options/4969 "2019-02-09T09:49:24Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jxavier](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex021/user_avatar/community.neo4j.com/jxavier/32/2702_2.png) [@jxavier](https://community.neo4j.com/u/jxavier)\ **Post date:** [February 9, 2019, 9:49am UTC](https://community.neo4j.com/t/neo4j-community-edition-on-aws-additional-storage-options/4969/1 "2019-02-09T09:49:24Z")
Greetings! I am quite new to Neo4j, especially, the cloud editions. I am planning to start with the community edition on AWS. I checked the neo4j AMIs and noticed that the actual database is stored on the root volume itself - which I would like to avoid. What I would like is to store the actual data on a separate EBS volume attached to the instance. This way, (1) My data will be separate from the root volume, (2) I can pick/scale the storage size, (3) I can take/manage backups. Is it possible to attach a separate EBS volume to the neo4j instance and store the data on it? Thanks ---
**Author:** ![jxavier](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex021/user_avatar/community.neo4j.com/jxavier/32/2702_2.png) [@jxavier](https://community.neo4j.com/u/jxavier)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2019, 8:02am UTC](https://community.neo4j.com/t/neo4j-community-edition-on-aws-additional-storage-options/4969/2 "2019-02-13T08:02:01Z")
Am I the only one who doesn't want to store the data on root disk? 🤔 ---
**Author:** ![david\_allen](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex021/user_avatar/community.neo4j.com/david_allen/32/13090_2.png) [@david\_allen](https://community.neo4j.com/u/david_allen)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2019, 12:50pm UTC](https://community.neo4j.com/t/neo4j-community-edition-on-aws-additional-storage-options/4969/3 "2019-02-14T12:50:46Z")
Generally just an AMI won't do this "out of the box" because it's just an AMI, but of course you can do it. To do it, you would: - Provision an EBS volume for your data directory (/var/lib/neo4j/data) - Stop neo4j inside of the VM - Mount the EBS volume to the right spot - Restart Neo4j Then you'd be good to go. For our enterprise offerings on AWS we do just this -- the data is on a separate EBS volume. But those are done with CloudFormation templates so we can automate a lot of this stuff like provisioning EBS and attaching it. When you launch an AMI you just get the operating system as it is. ---
**Author:** ![utkarsh.upendra](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex021/user_avatar/community.neo4j.com/utkarsh.upendra/32/15485_2.png) [@utkarsh.upendra](https://community.neo4j.com/u/utkarsh.upendra)\ **Post date:** [December 12, 2020, 12:25pm UTC](https://community.neo4j.com/t/neo4j-community-edition-on-aws-additional-storage-options/4969/4 "2020-12-12T12:25:50Z")
I created an additional EBS volume to do just this. But when I mounted it to /var/lib/neo4j/data directory, it starts throwing errors with pam. pam\_unix(sudo:auth): auth could not identify password for and the service doesn't come up. Any resolution on this? ---
**Author:** ![david\_allen](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex021/user_avatar/community.neo4j.com/david_allen/32/13090_2.png) [@david\_allen](https://community.neo4j.com/u/david_allen)\ **Post date:** [December 16, 2020, 2:32pm UTC](https://community.neo4j.com/t/neo4j-community-edition-on-aws-additional-storage-options/4969/5 "2020-12-16T14:32:30Z")
We'd need more of an error to figure out what's going on there but my best guess is the file permissions may be off. The drive needs to be readable/writable by neo4j:neo4j (user & group in linux). If it's only root writable, neo4j would constantly fail to use it, since the service runs under that user.