Spaces - free trial is running still, will I be billed? 2ndly can you move files from droplet to space?

September 14, 2018 1.1k views
Billing Ubuntu 16.04
vps2018
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vps2018

Recently I started a space because my server on a droplet had crashed and I was looking for a way to easily move some tens of GBs of files somewhere in order to restore them in due course to a replacement droplet without uploading them from my system with a slow upload speed. I couldn’t find a way to move the files to the space, and as it happened I had other things to work on - with the server down and all. So I deleted the space. The space was only up for a few hours and was empty, but my billing usage shows the trial to be still running for 314 hours. Though of course I am being charged $0 at the moment, will the free period expire in due course and will I end up being charged for this space that is deleted and I’m not using?

Secondly can I easily move files from a droplet to a space and back again? I could only see how I might upload files to a space.

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1 Answer
jarland MOD September 15, 2018

Hey friend!

Great question. After 60 days of trial time you would be billed $5/m (unless your outbound bandwidth and/or storage exceed the $5 value). If you don’t want to be billed for that, just make sure you remove any spaces you’ve made. You can read a bit more about it here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/overview/

You can definitely move files in and out of a space from a droplet. With that said, consider that this is object storage which is similar to S3, it can be a bit awkward to treat it like a USB drive. It can be done, s3fs-fuse should handle it, but there can be oddities with fuse in general under certain use cases.

Consider Spaces, but also consider block storage. Block storage is more like plugging a USB hard drive to your droplet. It is read as a local disk, it formats and mounts, and you can detach it from a droplet and attach it to another (within the same datacenter). You can do snapshots of it as well. Check it out:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/volumes/overview/

Jarland

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  • vps2018 September 15, 2018

    Thanks for the prompt reply.

    My only concern is that my free trial period continues to run in Billing even though I have deleted the Space. And as far as I am concerned I spent maybe half an hour seeing whether it would answer a problem during a panic before moving on to wrestle with the pressing issue of my crashed server. I deleted the Space sometime the same day. But the “free trial” continues to run in my Billing Account. Currently 338 hours. Can I assume that if I do not open another Space that after 1440 hrs (60 days) this item will disappear from my Billing Account?

    Thank you too for your suggestion to look at block storage. By coincidence after posting my question I decided to do exactly that. And you’re right, I can mount the Volume to the Droplet, and then I’ve got a path, and that’s something I can understand (at least to the limited extent that I can understand anything).

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