I recently enabled the automatic backup option on my Droplet. It says it backs up once a week but I am not sure how reliable this is for disaster recovery purposes.
A few questions:
- How far back can I restore from?
- Is there a way to trigger a manual backup outside of the weekly schedule?
- Would automatic backups alone be enough to protect a small production app with a PostgreSQL database?
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Hi there,
DigitalOcean now offers more flexibility than just weekly backups. You can choose between basic plans (weekly or daily) billed as a percentage of your Droplet cost, or a usage-based plan where you configure your own frequency anywhere from every 4 hours up to weekly, with custom retention periods.
On the basic plans: weekly backups are retained for four weeks, daily backups are retained for seven days. You can also now pick your own backup window rather than letting DigitalOcean choose the time.
For manual backups, you cannot trigger an automatic backup on demand, but you can take a snapshot anytime from the control panel or via doctl. Snapshots are kept until you delete them and cost $0.06/GB per month.
For a production app with PostgreSQL, Droplet backups alone are not enough. Two reasons: backups are not ideal for Droplets with heavy I/O workloads like database servers, because disk write performance is degraded while the backup is being created. And even daily backups mean you could lose up to 24 hours of data.
A solid setup for a small production app:
- Enable daily Droplet backups as a baseline
- Use DigitalOcean Managed Databases for PostgreSQL, which includes automated backups with point in time recovery. Docs here: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/databases/postgresql/how-to/back-up-restore/
- Take a manual snapshot before any significant changes
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