Snapshots Glossary

Snapshots are on-demand disk images of DigitalOcean Droplets and volumes saved to your account. Use them to create new Droplets and volumes with the same contents.


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

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.