Backups Features

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

How Do DigitalOcean Backups Work?

We use a snapshot-based backup system that creates a point-in-time image based on the current state of a Droplet. These are called crash-consistent backups because the image retains the entirety of the disk’s data at the moment it is created.

Crash-Consistent Backup

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.

The following process occurs on your Droplet when a backup occurs:

1. We take a snapshot of the live system to create a crash-consistent, point-in-time image.
2. We back up the snapshot off-disk.
3. We delete the snapshot once the backup is complete.

We create these backups in the background while the Droplet is running, so you don’t need to power down.

Backup Frequency, Retention, and Schedule

Note

DigitalOcean’s automated backups do not include volumes, but you can take manual backups with volume snapshots.

You can enable weekly or daily backups for Droplets. Backups are available for all Droplets, but they may not be ideal for Droplets with heavy I/O workloads, such as database servers, because disk writes have degraded performance while the backup is being created.

We retain weekly backups for four weeks and daily backups for seven days. We store backups in the same datacenter as the corresponding Droplet.

Backups occur during a backup window, which is a 4-hour window of time during which the Droplet automatically initiates a new backup. You can customize your backup window when you enable backups and view your current backup window on the Droplet’s Backups page.