We are ending the life of a web application and taking it offline.
What is the best approach to take a backup of this droplet if it would still be needed to taken online at a later time? But not having to pay for a droplet that is not used.
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!
Accepted Answer
This is one of the exact intended use cases of Snapshots!
Read here: How to Create Snapshots of Droplets
What you’ll want to do is:
- Power off the Droplet
- Take a snapshot
- Now the snapshot is saved in your account separately from the Droplet, you’ll be able to see it in the Images > Snapshots section of Control Panel.
- Now you can safely destroy the Droplet, if you ever want to recreate the application you will just need to Create or Restore Droplets from Snapshots
Two important caveats:
- You will be charged for the storage of the Snapshot at $0.05/GiB per month. Pricing is based on the size of the snapshot, not the size of the filesystem being saved. Snapshots are often much smaller than the Droplet storage limit, for example I have a web app snapshot that is 4GB so it costs me $0.2/month.
- You will lose the IP Address of the original Droplet. When you create a new Droplet based on the snapshot, it will have a new IP Address. So you’ll need to update DNS and possibly some other config if you re-create the app.
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and AI-native businesses
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.