How you manage duplicate volume names

Data ONTAP does not support having more than one volume with the same name on a storage system. Data ONTAP renames such volumes, but the name it uses can cause problems, so you need to take corrective action.

When Data ONTAP detects a potential duplicate volume name, it appends the string “(d)” to the end of the name of the new volume, where d is a digit that makes the name unique.

For example, if you have a volume named vol1, and you copy a volume named vol1 from another storage system, Data ONTAP renames the newly copied volume to vol1(1).

You must rename any volume with an appended digit as soon as possible, for the following reasons:

The name containing the appended digit is not guaranteed to persist across reboots. Renaming the volume will prevent the name of the volume from changing unexpectedly later on.
The parentheses characters, “(” and “)”, are not legal characters for NFS. Any volume whose name contains those characters cannot be exported to NFS clients.
The parentheses characters could cause problems for client scripts.

Parent topic: How volumes work