Snapshots Features

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.


Snapshots provide a full copy of a DigitalOcean Droplet or volume. Creating a snapshot saves everything from the Droplet or volume’s disk to a disk image saved in your DigitalOcean account. You can use snapshots to archive a Droplet or volume at a point in time. We also back up snapshots offsite for additional resiliency.

You can use snapshots to create new Droplets or volumes with the same contents of the snapshot. You can back up the contents of a block storage volume, restore a Droplet to the point in time when a snapshot was taken, or migrate a Droplet to a different region.

Snapshots are retained indefinitely until manually deleted. Snapshots are independent of the Droplets used to create them. When you destroy a Droplet, snapshots from that Droplet remain accessible on the Backups & Snapshots page in the Snapshots tab.