http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/132797/how-to-dd-a-remote-disk-using-ssh-on-local-machine-and-save-to-a-local-disk

If your intent is to backup a remote computer’s HDD A via SSH to a single file that’s on your local computer’s HDD, you could do one of the following…

run from local computer

$ ssh user@remote "dd if=/dev/sda | gzip -1 -" | dd of=image.gz

Will this policy change with the new snapshot policy of having to pay to store them?

Issue is now 5 years old .. and its gone from “This is hard, because security” through to “no, we are not going to do it, ever.”.

Adding a “User Vote” page to get feedback - get a lot of feedback - ignore feedback - remove “User Vote” page.

I can see that this is good for DO, but not that good for users. I can see where DO is coming from in a way … you can see their point of view quite clearly if you make the assumption that users don’t know what they are doing, and need to be “protected” from themselves.

Ah well, solution is pretty simple
1) migrate droplets to a more techy-friendly environment that doesn’t treat users like kindergarten subjects.

2) delete droplets
3) close account

Anyone downloaded a droplet and installed on his local server, kinda a clone environment for testing?

Same here… moving on because of the shift in policy on snapshots and the inability to download them to our own storage. Also feeling like the new block storage pricing is a missed opportunity. To price it so highly means it can’t fulfill our needs, which is affordable local-to-the-droplet storage.

Has anybody done a personal Snapshot as detailed above and then done a successful restore?

Isn’t that the test of a backup?

This makes no sense…if someone hack the account and destroy all your backups there is no way to recover it. I don’t know why they don’t have this simple option to download the backups just for extra security.

I love the hell outta digital ocean but this is really one sided thinking, this is why I have less than 1 GB stored in my DO acct at any one time, because the development end has to happen on my storage media, otherwise it physically belongs to Digital Ocean!

If devs had the opportunity to swap up and down stream with there DO accts I bet DO storage business would triple. Anyhow spinnup a droplet to check out something new, or test a scenario your afraid to try on your own hardware, lol, this what DO is good for, and I will continue to be supportive!

Can we please see some progress on this issue? I have Droplets running only for the purpose of saving snapshots to be able to use them for the creation of new Droplets in the future.

Hello and welcome to Digitalocean,

“Unfortunately you are unable to store a snapshot or backup outside of our environment.”

Sorry to say it :-(

I was wondering the same thing. It would be nice to save locally, keep them on a external hdd or something, and then upload straight back up in case you ever need to. I usually make a lot of snapshots for the case you might ever need a full-backup and that does not happen often, so storing on local storage is very cheap that way.

Well, apparently I have to manually move all the most necessary, restoring many of my snapshots. Then, snapshots, and the droplet will be removed, and I’ll have to find another hosting.

any new news ?

here is the command which worked for me:

ssh root@ipaddress “dd if=/dev/vda1 | gzip -1 -” | dd of=image.gz

You can vote for it on this link. The idea was proposed 5 years ago and has over 6000 votes. Digital Ocean claim that they have been “gathering feedback” since 2015. I wonder how much feedback they need.

is there any updates about this issue??
i really need it

Issue is now running 4 years. Elon Musk will likely be appearing supported by a zimmer frame before any cloud host allows this … You can of course take a running snapshot from another machine but where would you upload it? You’d need the same CPU and chipset etc… I’d suggest taking a manifest of a VPS. You won’t want to install most of it anyway, just the business end right? So what’s needed is a basic bash script that takes a copy of all the dB. Web, VPN and crt’s etc.... And zips them ready to be included anywhere else.