Why are snapshots so slow

March 2020, extremely annoying! In my mind the whole point was to be able to be back in business ASAP. Trying to do this is a pain in the ass. Why hasn’t DO addressed this yet is beyond me. I will have to buy my own servers or take my business somewhere else.

Here’s an interesting fact. I have found that snapshots of large DO volumes are very quick to snapshot – much much quicker than snapshots of droplets. My small droplets (under 5 GB) take about 15 minutes to snapshot. But when I backup my large (over 15 GB) volumes, it takes only a second. If you have a large amount of data, consider moving that data to a volume to increase snapshot speed. Hope that helps.

I hate the speed of snapshot. if I have to perform server upgrade, I have to take backup as snapshot so I can restore to old version if upgrade fails. But since snapshot is unreliable in time it take and it is slow. It make upgrades harder.

It’s a shame that there’s no automated way of telling the droplet to automatically turn back on once the snapshot is complete. I’m sure it used to turn back on with no option not to have that happen, which is just as bad. Seems like a silly oversight not to let the user decide what happens.

It’s also a shame that the shapshot isn’t quickly generated locally on the same server so the droplet can be turned back on. Then in the background the new shapshot can be slowly moved to the HDD’s at DO’s convenience (rather than our inconvenience).

This is really becoming a problem. I was able to copy my entire droplet to another droplet over networking in about 5 minutes. It’s been 20 minutes and I’m still waiting for a snapshot of the same droplet to finish.

Hi

I’m more than aware the read and write rates of SSDs. 35 minutes to copy as many gigabytes is not down to the read or write rate of the SSD it’s down to DO’s infrastructure.

It’s ridiculous how long snapshots take to create on the DO platform. Takes from 30 to 40 minutes for a 50GB droplet. I’ll be moving my droplet / instance elsewhere. Untenable to take server down for 30 to 40 minutes just to create what should be a quick backup.

Sep 2021. an hour into taking snapshot of a 320gb volume, it’s maybe 45% done. very annoying. I’ve already migrated a bunch of servers to Hetzner. I have 160gb volumes over there. Snapshots take a few minutes, maybe 10 mins at most. They clearly copied DO’s interface and features so its mostly the same and its like a third of the price. Clearly it can be faster but weirdly not DO’s priority to fix one of the most essential features.

It’s 2021, this issue is now 6 years old, and DO still has incredibly slow snapshots. Unbelievable. There is no technical reason why a snapshot should take 20, 30, 40 minutes. This is indicative of poor infrastructure. That this issue is so old, so annoying, and hasn’t been addressed makes me wonder if there is some non-public reason that DO is trying to keep people from making snapshots. I use snapshots aggressively when testing new installation options, and this is absurd for my purposes. I can not in good conscience recommend Digital Ocean as a platform to anyone until this issue is resolved.

It would be nice to see a speed increase when creating a snapshop. It takes a very long time to create a 6gig backup. Been waiting for 30 minutes at 50%