Snapshots Support Articles

You cannot change the frequency of Droplet backups, but you can use SnapShooter or the API to create daily snapshots of your Droplets.

You cannot undo restoring a Droplet from a backup, but you can use an existing snapshot to restore a Droplet to a previous point in time.

Take a snapshot of your Droplet and then create new Droplet from the snapsnot in the new datacenter.

You cannot create Droplets in certain datacenters due to limited capacity. If you have snapshots in a limited capacity datacenter, transfer them to another datacenter to create Droplets from them.

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.

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.

Create a new Droplet from your snapshot image.

Create a snapshot of the Droplet, then create a new Droplet from that snapshot.

As a temporary workaround, new DigitalOcean users who begin with team account can transfer snapshots to other users via teams instead of directly via email address.

You can recover your Droplet if you have taken a snapshot of the Droplet or signed up for automated backups.

Snapshots do not retain the IP address of the Droplet they were created from, but you can use reserved IPs to assign the same address to new or redeployed Droplets.

Destroying a Droplet destroys the backups along with it. You’ll want to preserve your backups first.

You cannot currently download DigitalOcean backups or snapshots, but you can use third-party tools to save your data locally.

You can manually back up a Droplet using DigitalOcean snapshots or backups or, alternatively, using a third-party tool like rsync or SFTP.

You can transfer snapshots of Droplets to other users, who can then recreate the Droplet on their account from the snapshot.

Creating a backup or snapshot takes roughly 2 minutes per GB of used space.