Dive into the volume

A lot of people frequently ask “Where is Docker actually storing my data when I use a named volume?”

If you want to know, you can use the docker volume inspect command.

$ docker volume inspect todo-db
[
    {
        "CreatedAt": "2019-09-26T02:18:36Z",
        "Driver": "local",
        "Labels": {},
        "Mountpoint": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/todo-db/_data",
        "Name": "todo-db",
        "Options": {},
        "Scope": "local"
    }
]

The Mountpoint is the actual location on the disk where the data is stored. Note that on most machines, you will need to have root access to access this directory from the host. But, that’s where it is!

Accessing volume data directly on Docker Desktop

While running in Docker Desktop, the Docker commands are actually running inside a small VM on your machine. If you wanted to look at the actual contents of the Mountpoint directory, you would need to first get inside of the VM.