How Do I Take Snapshots and Backups of My DigitalOcean Droplet?

Snapshots vs Backups

DigitalOcean offers two ways to preserve your Droplet's disk state:

• Snapshots — manual, on-demand copies you trigger yourself. You pay per GB stored ($0.06/GB/month). Ideal before risky changes like OS upgrades.
• Automated Backups — weekly snapshots taken automatically, retained for four weeks. Costs 20% of the Droplet price. Ideal for production servers.

Take a Manual Snapshot

In the control panel, select your Droplet → Backups → Snapshots → Take Snapshot. Name it descriptively, like pre-nginx-config-2026-06. The Droplet stays online during the snapshot — there is no downtime.

Via CLI (doctl):

doctl compute droplet-action snapshot DROPLET_ID --snapshot-name "my-snapshot"

Enable Automated Backups

On the Droplet page, click Enable Backups under the Backups tab. Backups run weekly at a time you choose. Each backup is kept for four weeks, giving you a rolling four-week recovery window.

When creating a new Droplet, check Enable automated backups in the final step to turn it on from the start.

Restore from a Snapshot

Snapshots are not in-place restores — you create a new Droplet from the snapshot:

1. Go to Images → Snapshots in the control panel
2. Click More → Create Droplet next to the snapshot
3. Choose a size and region, then launch

The new Droplet is an exact clone of the disk at snapshot time, including all files, configs, and installed software.

Best Practices

• Snapshot before every major change — OS upgrade, database migration, config overhaul
• Enable automated backups on any Droplet you cannot afford to rebuild
• Store application data (uploads, databases) separately when possible — use DigitalOcean Spaces or Managed Databases so backups are independent of the Droplet
• Test restores periodically — a backup you have never restored is a guess
• Delete old snapshots you no longer need to avoid storage charges

Off-Site Backups

For critical data, do not rely on snapshots alone. Schedule a cron job to dump databases and sync files to Spaces or another provider:

0 3 * * * pg_dump mydb | gzip > /backups/mydb-$(date +%F).sql.gz

Snapshots and backups together give you both quick recovery and long-term protection on DigitalOcean.