Difference between offline and Online Snapshoot

Posted on August 26, 2016

Deployment

Backups

Control Panels

DigitalOcean

Applications

Ubuntu

By Amresh Amar

There is strange dissimilarity between Active droplet snapshot and Inactive droplet

Active Droplet Snapshot Size : Close to 5GB Inactive Droplet Snapshot Size: Close to 25GB

Now I want to know - how reliable is active droplet snapshot - considering Inactive droplet snapshot is 100% safe for recreation of the droplet.

And why there is this much difference in snapshot size.

Is there any difference in terms of data capture between Active and inactive droplet snapshot.

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Ryan Quinn

August 26, 2016

Accepted Answer

There should not be this type of discrepancy between the two methods. Both types of snapshots are the same, creating a complete copy of your disk image. A snapshot taken when your droplet is powered on is not considered as safe since it is possible for data to change while the snapshot image is being created, this is especially a concern with databases seeing a lot of activity.

I was informed that our engineering team rolled out an update to our control panel this week to correct an issue where snapshot sizes were being reported larger than they should be. It was a high priority to get that updated before we begin charging for snapshot storage for obvious reasons. If you are able to see both these snapshots in your account right now I’d recommend opening a ticket with our support team so they can take a look.