Report this

What is the reason for this report?

Are droplet backups secure?

Posted on May 31, 2014

Before I upload my private keys to a droplet, I want to make sure they will be secure. I selected the backup option during droplet creation. Is the backup encrypted? Also are snapshots encrypted?



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Thanks Andrew. I was referring to the private keys for the domain SSL certificates. I totally agree about generating unique SSH & GPG keys for each server. Yes, the server itself will need to be secure, but a secure backup is also vital. It is good to know that the backups and snapshots are encrypted before being sent to Amazon Glacier which uses (AES) 256-bit symmetric keys.

Hey Chris! <br> <br>All created backups and snapshots are stored on Amazon Glacier, and before they are sent they are encrypted. <br> <br>As far as your private keys go, what kind of keys are you talking about? SSH or GPG keys? Remember that no matter how well encrypted a backup might be, your server itself is still the main point of attack. If need to SSH from one server to another, you should create a new key pair for each machine. That makes it simpler to revoke one later if it is compromised while still having access with the key pair from your local machine. If you need to do GPG signing on the server, create a subkey for that. Again it will allow you to revoke it if it becomes compromised.

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.