SnapShooter Quickstart

Validated on 26 Sep 2023 • Last edited on 4 Oct 2024

SnapShooter is a cloud backup and recovery solution. Use SnapShooter to back up servers, volumes, databases, and applications from DigitalOcean and other cloud providers.

To get started with SnapShooter, first you need to create a SnapShooter account. You can get started for free:

Create a SnapShooter account to try the service for free.
snapshooter.com

Once you have a SnapShooter account, you can set up backups for servers, volumes, databases, and applications.

About SnapShooter Backups

SnapShooter supports two kinds of backups: native backups and backup jobs.

  • Native backups use your cloud provider’s backup product. These products are called different names depending on the provider, like DigitalOcean Snapshots or Amazon Machine Images (AMIs).

    SnapShooter creates and manages these backups on your behalf by using the provider’s API, which allows you to take more frequent backups with finer control over retention than the cloud providers themselves offer.

  • Backup jobs run using SnapShooter’s custom engine to back up hosted resources (like files, application servers, or database servers) to your chosen S3-based storage provider. You can use backup jobs with any server that you can add to SnapShooter.

    You can use SnapShooter as your storage provider with SnapShooter Simple Storage, which lets you store backup data without setting up your own storage. Alternatively, you can set up DigitalOcean Spaces Object Storage or other storage providers, like AWS S3.

Using Native Backups

To use SnapShooter for native backups, you need to connect at least one team from DigitalOcean:

You can connect any number of DigitalOcean teams to a single SnapShooter account to set up daily or hourly backups for Droplets and volumes on those teams.

Then, you can set up native backups:

Back up DigitalOcean Droplets daily or hourly with SnapShooter. SnapShooter uses the DigitalOcean API via OAuth authentication to take backups and prune them on your behalf.
Back up DigitalOcean Volumes Block Storage daily or hourly with SnapShooter. SnapShooter uses the DigitalOcean API via OAuth authentication to take backups and prune them on your behalf.
This feature is deprecated. Use SnapShooter to manage daily or hourly native backups for servers from other supported cloud providers, like Amazon, Exoscale, and Hetzner.

Using Backup Jobs

To use SnapShooter’s backup jobs, you need to choose a storage provider.

You can use SnapShooter as your storage provider with SnapShooter Simple Storage, which lets you store backup data without setting up your own storage. Alternatively, you can set up DigitalOcean Spaces Object Storage or other storage providers, like AWS S3.

After you choose a storage provider, you can back up files, databases, applications, and anything else we have a backup job for:

Use SnapShooter to automatically create a full or incremental backup of your server files, compress it, and schedule future backups.
Use SnapShooter to automatically create backups for a MySQL database server and store them in S3-based storage of your choice.
Use SnapShooter to automatically create compressed backups for your WordPress database and website directory and transfer them automatically to S3-based storage of your choice.

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