How long does snapshot takes to create ?

September 15, 2014 21.1k

By:

hunky

It seems its taking well over 45 mins, still the snapshot is getting created.. Its bit too longer for a production environment to stay offline..

How long does it take to create a snapshot ??

1GB droplet having around 12% of used disc ??

Server is offline for well over 45 mins as the snapshot keeps showing processing !!!

I dont even see any option to cancel the process and start the server :( any one knows how to stop the snapshot creation process so that the server can be taken back online ??

2 comments

payu January 22, 2017
It's 2017, bro!
Can digital ocean show any progress?
tlowrey January 31, 2018
2018 checking in. snapshots are still unbearably slow, and yep, the notification just stays at 50% the whole time. i've waited over an hour for a 6GB snapshot. that's considerably slower than usb2. what the hell??? if someone can theoretically take 18 year old technology and transfer data faster, then what the hell are we paying for? this is absurd, to the max.

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44 Answers

info101261 October 9, 2014

FYI - 20GB in AMS1 took 9mins

TenHourGuy October 7, 2015

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.

Zonax7100 January 2, 2016

Same in 2016... It's still really slow...

tomw August 25, 2016

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.

tomw August 25, 2016

100g in 2h 17 in the end for SGP1

larry September 15, 2014

It sounds like something is stuck. The control panel may be out of sync as well. If you have logged out of the control panel and logged in with no change, it is time to submit a support ticket.

hunky September 15, 2014

I too thought that and created a support ticket, but few mins later I found the job done notification and it seems Nothing was stuck..

System just took 55 mins to create a snapshot of 3.6GB of data !!!

DO guys seriously needs to look into it as its far to longer to sustain the down time :( for production servers !!
yoosefi September 15, 2014

This is good to know, I have a snapshot of about 9GB going and I was getting worried since the progress bar never moves. I even opened a ticket. I'll just let it run its course I guess.
hunky September 15, 2014

For test setup, time wont be a factor but when taking snapshot of production servers, these time frames are huge !!

If 3.6 GB takes 1 hr, then larger droplets will take a lot of time, and 2/3 hrs of down time for a production website is quite a lot :(
larry September 15, 2014

They don't usually take that long. My snapshots (filling about 23% of a 512 MB droplet's disk space - whatever that amounts to) take at most a few minutes to complete.

vitaly May 14, 2015

Same thing. It's down for 15 minutes already and still spinning.
They should have an option to cancel the process.
It's not the first time this happens to me.

Framerate August 29, 2015

21G in LON1 took 50 minutes!

indigo7333 December 29, 2015

Same in 2015, didn't know the snapshot is going to take so much time.

shanjie February 13, 2016

30GB, 40mins

natxoasenjo February 26, 2016

With such fast disks (ssds all over the place), why does it take so long to create the snapshots? Are you using qemu snapshots?

Maybe using some cow storage technology (Netapp or any ZFS enabled provider) would greatly improve the snapshotting experience ;-)

TenHourGuy April 16, 2016

Really liking this new snapshot update. Now I can see a snapshot of 47.26GB took 39m53s to be created in the AMS3 region. :D

Not too bad for testing and such, I suppose. They really ought to add in the option to make your droplet automatically destroy itself after having an image taken instead of just booting up again since it's no doubt common to take a snapshot before getting rid of a droplet. Would save me a few hours sleep waiting just to save a few pennies for the snapshot to finish being taken.

KeitelDOG April 19, 2016

I have a staging server with around 15G (14GB of musics) (400MB (3,000 files) pictures), it took 19 minutes 56 seconds! May be cause music files copy are faster.
Anyway Good job DO Teams, that's great even for Production.

BTW: Droplet is $5/month -> 512MB and 20GB

simPod September 11, 2016

Same here, I wish I read this before I clicked Create snapshot...

developcents October 1, 2016

Same story. Digital Ocean needs to make it clear that snapshots take a long time to complete, and they need to provide an option to cancel the snapshot.

hristo8d79da0f9 October 26, 2016

Joining the surprised here. Creating a snapshot of 512 MB Memory / 20 GB Disk / AMS2 took 27 minutes.

pandalion98 February 23, 2017

I just finished an online snapshot on SGP01 and it took 17 minutes (20GB).

dave186771 May 1, 2017

Well I was taking the snapshot in order to copy the image and spin up another server with it... but after waiting and then seeing this thread (with no DO response!) I'll just setup the new box w/ Linode instead.

washingtonian May 4, 2017

23.3GB in NYC1 took 25 minutes.

grandauto August 8, 2017

30.62 GB AMS3 - 20 minutes

reklamasev September 16, 2017

27 GB AMS2 - 22 minutes
Red notification "Sorry! Something went wrong" shows every two minutes.
Progressbar stucks on 50% until almost end of process.

kimiworld October 8, 2017

Hi Digital Ocean team.

12,17GB AMS2 tok almost 1 hours.

Progressbar stucks on 50% until almost end of process.

This has to be fix ASAP guys.

stu6b631e4394491e98c39429e December 8, 2017

Dealing with the same issue here. Just a simple notice "this may take 30-60 minutes" would be very helpful, because then I wouldn't have clicked to create a snapshot.

Ginkelb December 18, 2017

30Gb on AMS2 took 20min

Agree with @stu6b631e4394491e98c39429e should be a warning.

Making a snapshot should be snappy, as the word implies. Otherwise, I would have waited for a normal backup to have run and proceeded after that.

ajaiswaliitk January 18, 2018

It took 14 minutes for 22 GB - 4GB Ram/60GB disk server

slackmoehrle January 23, 2018

55gb in SFO2 has taken hours :-( Stuck at 50% and doesn't seem to be moving.

owlookit January 30, 2018

30Gb in SFO2 has taken more than 1.5 hrs, and still stuck at 50% as well...

derek3d2b6ad16e63d3c930a9e January 31, 2018

Really wish I'd seen this thread before creating my first snapshot (of a production server, no less). Just moved all my servers over from a different host and was looking forward to the convenience of snapshots & backups, only to find my server down for who knows long... "Progress" bar also just stuck at around 50% (it actually started at 50%)

meow2 February 5, 2018

grgrgrgr same here... I wish I had seen this before!!! WTF

FrRog February 28, 2018

Took us ~10 min to do 20GB snapshot in AMS3

KraftPixel March 10, 2018

March 2018 - No specific progress is shown while taking a snapshot. We need some kind of estimate rather than being glued to the screen, being unsure, waiting for it come back up.
Taking longer than 30 minutes, I wish there was some sort of warning about the time it would take!
33 minutes in - It moved from 50% - 90%

KraftPixel March 10, 2018

Disk usage was : 48G.
Took around 37 minutes in total.
NY3

Pel March 11, 2018

Absolutely absurd. 10GB of disk space and still waiting after 35 minutes. AWS is looking more and more inviting.

andrebu March 22, 2018

22.18GB in 14 minutes

purchasing9c636d00c1699dce March 26, 2018

9.4GB in 6 minutes.

rikeb46f8733d666074c5f4f32 March 27, 2018

46GB in 36 minutes. Still way too slow.

jcunningham March 28, 2018

TOR1 2.18GB 1.5hours

geoengineer2016 May 7, 2018

5.9 GB took 15 minutes. Looks like they have improved snapshoting time.

jcunningham May 14, 2018

TOR1 10.9GB 1 hour 43 minutes

GafferSystems May 15, 2018

7.47GB Took around 10 minutes for me, New York server.

naptichke May 25, 2018

AMS3 ~160GB
1.5 hours and still processing. Support team said that it takes around 1 to 3 minutes per GB...

martorana June 1, 2018

[deleted]

martorana June 1, 2018

FRA1 - 15.8G - 9 minutes

VYRNACH July 19, 2018

SGP1 - 19GB 1hour 58minutes

fuj1w4r4 October 8, 2018

I wish I seen this before i start to transfer

denisvaleev August 1, 2018

FRA1, 8Gb, 40 minutes

Which translates to about 0.2Gb per minute.

legyes August 29, 2018

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.

loyalpuppy October 6, 2018

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.... :)

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