Hello,

Suggesting a Backup copy is mainly to have a copy of the data inside your Droplet. DigitalOcean, will not have any copy of data with them on the platform, it leverages the Backup mechanisms to the users itself.

Backups are always associated with the Droplet, the moment you destroy the Droplet, backups will also be removed and purged. Snapshots work opposite, they will still be on your account even after the Droplet is removed.

Refer to below links:

https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/backups/
https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/snapshots/
https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/images/snapshots/how-to/

Data will not be lost, when on the Droplet, but whenever you destroy the Droplet, there will not be any copy of data on the platform.

Regards,
Sri Charan Madhavapeddi

Hi jofearth,

Automated backups give you the ability to recover your Droplet and the data it holds to a previous state. They’re generated weekly and retained for 4 weeks. Whether you need it or not depends on your use case.

There are two ways in which you can loose data:

1. The underlying hardware fails
2. Someone in your team accidentally deletes the data or misconfigures the Droplet.

Droplet SSDs are configured as RAID, giving you some fault tolerance and if we anticipate a server will fail we migrate your Droplet to a different one, but there’s always a chance that the data is irrecoverable.

That said, backups are not for everyone. If you don’t keep data in the droplet, or your data doesn’t change you might want to create a single Snapshot. This would let you quickly launch an identical Droplet if and when needed. Also, if your data changes too often, you might want to use a different strategy (for example, replicating databases to other Droplets)