How can I keep IP Address of destroyed droplet, after I recreate it using a snapshot from another droplet?

Posted on March 19, 2016

I have 5 droplets for a WebApp I’m building. The development has been kept on one droplet, and I now need to take a snapshot of this, and use the image to clone on the other 4 (regional) droplets. I understand how to do this, by destroying the existing droplets first (they have old data that I want to blitz), then recreating these droplets using the snapshot of the good droplet as a clone.

However, from what I’ve read, I will end up with new IP addresses doing this.

However, I really need to keep the existing IP Addresses that I have on my existing Droplets (that I will destroy / recreate), if at all possible. Is this possible?

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Ryan Quinn

March 21, 2016

It is possible :)

Instead of destroying the droplets you will instead navigate to the destroy page in the control panel but use the rebuild option. The drop-down menu will display all disk images you have available (make sure the snapshot you have is available in all regions you’ll need it in from the Images page first). Select your snapshot from the dropdown and choose “Rebuild from Image”.

Your droplet will be rebuilt using your snapshot image, permanently destroying anything currently on the droplet, but keeping the IP address.

alexdo

December 13, 2022

Hello there

When you destroy a Droplet, its IP address is released back into the data center’s pool of available IPs. These are assigned randomly, so it’s very unlikely you’ll get that IP address back. However, when you rebuild a Droplet, the IP address is retained.

You can find more information here:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/how-to/rebuild/

A DigitalOcean Reserved IP address is a publicly-accessible static IP address that you can assign to a Droplet and then reassign to another Droplet later, as needed. You can implement a failover mechanism with reserved IPs to build a high-availability infrastructure.

https://docs-digitalocean-com.translate.goog/products/networking/reserved-ips

Regards