Backups Glossary

Backups are automatically-created disk images of Droplets. Enabling backups for Droplets enables system-level backups at weekly intervals, which provides a way to revert to an older state or create new Droplets.


This glossary defines the core concepts behind backups to help build your mental model of how backups work and understand what the documentation is referring to when it uses certain terminology.

A crash-consistent backup is a disk image that stores the state of a disk exactly as it was at a single point in time.
Disk images are software copies of physical disks. Disk images save the data of a physical disk, like a hard drive, to one or more files.