How long does snapshot takes to create ?

This is worrying, I started a snapshot of a 2.5TB drive. I guess I should come back here in a week…

I started looking for this answer after I started taking a snapshot which is a shame. 100g android build environment SGP1. 45 min so far. Cancel would be a really useful option.

Same in 2016… It’s still really slow…

Before taking snapshots, I’d recommend getting rid of as much rubbish as possible, just due to how ridiculous the waiting times can be. Not only is your server down, money is being taken out of your pocket too. But yeah, fairly normal for it to sometimes take ages, particularly at peak times.

FYI - 20GB in AMS1 took 9mins

One thing that doesn’t seem to be clear to everyone (I include myself in this, as the DO documentation is not that explicit) is what a snapshot is. a snapshot, as the name implies is an exact copy of your server at the moment you take it.

This means if you want to take a snapshot of a system when it’s switched off, you can do it, then you can immediately restart the system while you wait for it to complete.

There’s no need to leave it switched off, unless for some reason the work you are about to do post-snapshot requires it.

For example, if you want to make a change, you might want confirmation that the snapshot was successful before making the change, but there’s no need to leave the system switched off during that period unless the live system may have changes made that you can’t roll back in case of a failure. But in that case you might just put any apps in read only / maintenance mode rather than leaving it switched off.

Few days ago it took almost 45 minutes to back up a 3.42GB droplet. Doing another with even less storage used; still taking forever. It’s absurd, really.

I’m using a mounted CephFS drive for storage, as Volumes alone cannot be multi-mounted. Don’t know if it’s processing all files in network storage or what, but it’s slow.

Edit: This one “only” took around 30 minutes. For 2.95 GB.

A satisfied DO customer here… we have several droplets, spending over a thousand bucks monthly here… and we love it.

But snapshot creation speed is a thing here. FRA1, 160GB disk… snapshot started more than an hour ago… the progress bar is misleading … quickly reached 50% (in approx 20 minutes) then being stuck there ever since.

I kind of expected the long running time… but a more informative, more accurate status report, progress bar would be very helpful. And, as others stated, better speed would be expected… to minimize server downtime.

Thank you DO for listening to us, looking into this issue.

I’m irritated too by the time it takes to do the snapshot. I have a 320GB instance with maybe 50 gigs to snapshot so I can see its gonna take awhile :(

But… To the guy who said AWS is looking inviting… Man I have my whole business on Amazon and its costing me $1200/month and I’m exploring moving over to DigitalOcean.

DigitalOcean still has Amazon beat. Amazon absolutely slaughters you with pricing. I’ll just keep more on the elastic volumes here and snapshot that so i dont need to snapshot my whole instance often.

So far, I am enchanted with DigitalOcean. Man the servers are FAST. Screw Amazon man I can’t tell you how many times I ended up holding the bag because something failed and they said ‘Failure is a feature’. Worst support I ever seen. Don’t be so quick to knock DigitalOcean, its easy as pie to use and nice and simple. I will be recommending it to all my customers who sometimes like to get their own servers and I been using Amazon s3 but will be exploring the Spaces option here also. Theres… Something about this service I really like. Maybe is that damn fish that’s swimming to keep me busy while that slow console loads lol… :)

FRA1, 4GB data, 2+ hours and still runs at “50%”. It’s an important production server and no ticket reply, no cancel snapshot button… I’m very disappointed and upset.