Backup DigitalOcean Droplets
Overview
Learn how to backup your DigitalOcean droplets either daily or hourly. SnapShooter will use the DigitalOcean API via OAuth authentication to take backups and prune them on your behalf.
Related Articles
Viewing all Droplets in DigitalOcean
Under Native Snapshots > DigitalOcean in the left sidebar you will see Droplets.
This will take you to a view of all of your droplets. If you have just connected a fresh account this will appear as a list of Inactive droplets. If you already have active backups you may need to select inactive backups to view droplets you wish to backup.
Activating Droplet Backups
Find the Droplet you wish to activate and press the Activate button on the right hand side.
You will be asked to choose how often you would like to backup your server.
Depending on your plan, you can choose between daily and hourly backups.
You can also choose the timezone in which you want the backup to happen, as well as the start time.
If you backup more than once a day, we will count your timezone and daily backup time as the tag for the daily backup.
Retention Policy
Once you press Next you will be taken to the retention policy screen where you can select how many past backups you wish to keep. When we take a backup we tag them daily, weekly and monthly and you can choose how many of each you wish to keep.
In this example we have asked SnapShooter
Keep the last 10 '3 hourly' backups
Keep the last 7 'daily' backups
Keep the last 4 'weekly' backups
Keep the last 12 'monthly' backups.
Most of our customers choose 7 days, 4 weeks and 12 months as a good base line for backups.
Backup Region Replication
Region replication allows for your snapshots to be transferred to a second region once a droplet has been successfully backed up.
If your plan allows it, you will be presented with a list of regions you can duplicate backups too. There is no extra cost with DigitalOcean for replicating the backups.
Viewing Droplet
Under Native Snapshots > DigitalOcean in the left sidebar you will see Droplets.
The active backups tab will be automatically selected if you have activated droplet backups with SnapShooter.
From here, select the droplet you wish to see status of.
Understanding the SnapShooter Droplet Page
Top left - Shows you the server details, name, ip, size, location and the timezone of the backup.
Top Right - Shows the backup schedule details. In this example: once a day (every 24hours), keep the last 3 daily, 4 weekly and 4 monthly backups. This also shows an estimate of the storage cost and the region replication, which is disabled in this example.
Bottom - Snapshots (backups)
Here is the table where we show the status of all backups
Manual Backup - A backup you can request by hand via SnapShooter. We will never prune these backups based on your policy. If you want to delete them you can press the Delete button under actions.
Completed Backups - that have been completed and are still active. They change to expired once deleted by the scheduler
Duration - The time the backup took to complete. You can expect between 1 and 3 minutes per GB depending on the activity of the Droplet
Tags - The scheduler will tag the backups if they fall into daily, weekly or monthly. You can see in this example snapshots can be tagged as more than one. This way we don't take 3 backups in the place of one and save you storage fees.
Regions where the snapshot is currently located
Size the size of the Snapshot
Actions here you can manually delete a Snapshot backup if you wish
Restoring
Please see our restoring guide to learn how to recover a Droplet from SnapShooter.
Thank you for helping us improve!