Hey, guys,

I know I’m a bit late to the party, but I can see BackupSheep has posted a link to there services.

We also provide a service dedicated to Digital Ocean that allows between hourly to daily backups of droplets and volumes with archiving of daily, weekly and monthly snapshots.

https://snapshooter.io

I’ve had some success backing MySql data.

I’ve set up automysqlbackup for data. Its super easy to get started. It does daily/weekly/monthly backups out of the box. I’m sure you can configure hourly backups as well.

apt-get install automysqlbackup

I then added a small storage volume to my droplet and symlinked the backup folder to that other device so I’m not actually storing the backups on the same device.

ln /mnt/backup-volume/var/lib/automysqlbackup /var/lib/automysqlbackup

Alternatively you could set up some storage with another service, e.g. Amazon S3 and rsync your backup folder to there so you aren’t relying on a single vendor.

Haven’t yet sorted out an easy solution for other data.

As I see some other solutions have been posted here, I’ll share the one I’ve been working on too.

We’ve been working on a solution for backing up your projects while keeping things super simple and quick to setup.

We’ve recently added a Zapier integration allowing you to trigger the backups from where you want and when you want.
You can find the documentation on how to do this here:
https://support.simplebackups.io/tutorials-and-how-tos/create-hourly-backups-using-zapier

https://simplebackups.io

Hello, I have written a simple script for snapshot automation which take new snapshot every hour and delete old snapshot.

You can try my script
https://github.com/ishan3350/DigitalOceanSnapshotHourlyAutomation

Thank you :)

@vanomashey

You’re able to generate your own backups using either Snapshots, or running you own server-side.

Snapshots generate full-state backups, meaning they take a snapshot of the entire server, thus they are meant to restore the entire server, including the OS, software, services and data. They function as an image and you can’t restore anything specific – it’s all or nothing.

If you specifically need data backups – content, uploads, databases, etc – and you don’t need a full image backup of the entire server, you’d need to generate the backups on your own as DigitalOcean doesn’t provide the means for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backups in this fashion just yet.

You can take snapshots instead of using the backup feature. Then you have full control of when you want the “backup”.

are the backups quiesced, (consistent)?
For example if we were running a cpanel server with databases and accounts, VMWare has quiesced backup so it is in a consistent state, whereas some other backups are just snapshots and not consistent.
Thanks

Could someone give me a quick breakdown of backup versus snapshot and when to use either?

We would one use an external service to do snapshots instead of the tools provided by Digital Ocean? Why would one use an external service to do backups instead of the tools provided by Digital Ocean?

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.