Daily\hourly backups

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.

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 :)

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?