Question

Any way to automatically snapshot a droplet and then shut down?

  • Posted on February 4, 2022
  • havarsakAsked by havarsak

To save money, it’d be advantageous to shut down droplets when I don’t use them. However, a 8Gb droplet takes a while to snapshot. I may well have made some changes that I’d like to keep, the alternative is to have some routine for backing up my data.

Is there some way to do this automatically? Just start the snapshotting process, and have the droplet destroyed when the snapshot is created?

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• February 6, 2022

Hi there,

Yes, this is doable with the DigitalOcean doctl command-line tool:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/compute/droplet-action/shutdown/

  • To shut down your Droplet you could use:
doctl compute droplet-action shutdown <droplet-id>

Reference:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/compute/droplet-action/shutdown/

  • To take a snapshot you could run the following:
doctl compute droplet-action snapshot <droplet-id> [flags]

Reference:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/compute/droplet-action/snapshot/

  • To delete a Droplet:
doctl compute droplet delete <droplet-id|droplet-name>... [flags]

Reference:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/compute/droplet/delete/

You can put that in a script and run it whenever you need to.

Alternatively, you could do the same but using the DigitalOcean API:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/api-reference/#operation/destroy_with_associated_resources_dangerous

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby