I am heading to retirement by the end of the year and I have been slowly off-loading clients. I’m still going to need a couple of sites on my droplet, but I’m only using an extremely low fraction of my current 160 GB droplet. I’m trying to figure out my best option for downsizing. Is it possible for me to restore a snapshot of my current droplet, and then restore it on a smaller droplet? Or would I be better off to set up the new droplet, do a WordPress install for each of my remaining sites, and then restore a WP backup from each site?
Is there another option that I’m not thinking of?
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Hey Paul,
Restoring a snapshot to a smaller droplet usually won’t work, snapshots capture the full disk image, so you can’t apply it to a droplet with less disk space, even if your actual usage is low. It’s more of a technical constraint than anything else (shrinking disk volumes is risky).
Your best bet is to spin up a new, smaller droplet with the latest OS, set up fresh WordPress installs, and restore your sites using WP backups. It’s a bit more effort, but much cleaner and future-proof, especially with retirement in mind.
If you hit any issues along the way, you can reach out to the DigitalOcean support team: https://do.co/support
Best of luck with the transition!
- Bobby
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