How do I recover a deleted Droplet?

You can recover a deleted Droplet if you previously took a snapshot of the Droplet or enabled backups for the Droplet.

• If you took a snapshot of your Droplet prior to deletion, you can create a new Droplet based on the snapshot image. Snapshots contain the data your Droplet contained at the time the snapshot was taken.

• If you [used SnapShooter for Droplet backups]((/products/snapshooter/how-to/back-up-droplets/), SnapShooter automatically created snapshots for you, so you can restore from those snapshots in your DigitalOcean team.

• If you enabled backups, the backups remain available until the end of their retention period, which is four weeks for weekly backups, seven days for daily backups, and a custom amount of time for usage-based backups. If backups are available, you can create or restore Droplets from backups.

If you have neither snapshots nor backups, then we do not have a backup of your Droplet’s data available in our system. In this scenario, you would need rely on any manual backups you created and stored on a local computer.

Related Topics

Can I downsize a Droplet using a snapshot?

You cannot downsize a Droplet from a snapshot. Data is not always stored sequentially in memory, so reducing the size of a disk can result in data loss or corruption.

How can I destroy my Droplets while maintaining my backups?

Convert your backups to snapshots to save them indefinitely.

Why is my snapshot's size different from reported disk usage?

Snapshots of Droplets are a best estimate based on the disk usage. Snapshots of volumes operate at the block storage level, so the snapshot size may not match what the filesystem reports.