There are specific problems with both snapshots and incremental backups. I would like to explain a bit more so an educated decision can be made.
If you have more than one application/ client hosted on a droplet - going via snapshot route means you cant simply restore or allow self-service kind of option for your clients to restore their specific data. more often than not, it’s not the server which goes down/crashes but its the human errors - DB deleted by developer/ files overwritten or deleted and so on. in some cases, due to hacking issues backup is needed to be restored.
In all these cases, restoring a new droplet and finding the codes/ db for a specific client and then migrating to the main droplet can be a lot of efforts.
In the above scenario, its best to have a third party service like code-guard etc setup that will automatically backup the codes (incremental basis) once everyday. restore to original/ direct server is very easy as well.
Snapshots are a good way to backup the whole setup - server optimization, OS, and everythnig else setup on the server. Best-case scenarios are when something majorly goes wrong with the original droplet and rather than fixing the issue - you/ team feels that restoring the whole droplet is easier and more viable.
Services like R1, Acronis can take care of both the things. Server level backups and restore + code/ file/ db level restore. We use these services for our Dedicated servers. Yet to find out if the same can work with DO.
Challenge using R1/ Acronis with DO resellers - the backup agent needs to be setup to every droplet individually. May not be viable for automation/ auto setups. May be some kind of template can be built and used to create more droplets and change the agent ID etc once and its all setup and ready.