Is it possible to spin up a new droplet from a snapshot where the new droplet is lower spec than the droplet that generated the snapshot (assuming that file sizes are within the storage limits of the new droplet)
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As long as the disk size of the snapshot is equal to or less than the size of the Droplet you’re trying to restore it to, you can definitely restore it.
If, for example, your snapshot is 40GB, you’d have to choose a Droplet with at least 40GB of storage available. So you wouldn’t be able to restore to a 20GB Droplet, but could restore to a 60GB, 80GB, etc.
CPU and RAM doesn’t matter when restoring as those are not hard limits and they are more flexible.
If anyone comes across this question and needs a quick / intuitive solution: You can attach a network volume to the droplet before you create it and essentially use it as a home directory and/or move your postgresql / mysql data directories to the network volume. Then you can create a separate droplet on a small powered server with the configuration you want. Then, when you deploy the server snapshot, you can choose any size you want, are not restricted by the original droplet size. You can then attach a snapshot of the network storage volume that contains the data.
This works for me. I have elastic CPU, storage and RAM requirements.
Same issue, what was your solution?
Same Issue!
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It is advisable to first create a droplet with a minimum size i.e. 512MB and then scale as required. However for any reason if a user need to scale-down, you will either have to physically migrate from one server to another or restore from backup or “maybe” spin a new droplet with additional block storage with a total minimum of the hard-disk capacity of your present (bigger) droplet.