DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Snapshots vs Backups

DigitalOcean provides two ways for archiving a Droplet or Volume at a point in time: backups and snapshots. But what are exactly the differences between the two types of images? Let’s see.

DigitalOcean backups

A DigitalOcean backup is a crash-consistent, point in time capture of your Droplet or Volume which can be used to create a new Droplet or restore an existing one to the backup state. A  crash-consistent backup  allows the system to capture all of the data exactly as it was at a single point in time on the disk. This means that the data is backed up in a consistent state. Once enabled, DigitalOcean backups automatically occur once per week with a cost of 20% of the Droplet price and are retained for 4 weeks. You can not replicate them in multiple regions. An important thing to remember is that when a Droplet is deleted, all associated backups will also be deleted.

DigitalOcean snapshots

A DigitalOcean snapshot is also a crash-consistent, point-in-time capture of a Droplet or Volume, but with more flexibility. They have to be manually created, can be replicated in multiple DigitalOcean regions (for Droplets only), and are not deleted when the Droplet or Volume is deleted. Instead of paying 20% of the Droplet price, you pay 0.05$ per GB per month. The price is based on the size of the snapshot, not the size of the filesystem being saved. Another important thing to remember is that there is no additional charge for making a snapshot available in multiple regions, but you have to manually trigger the replication.

What to use? Snapshots or Backups?

For most businesses, weekly backups are not enough and are more expensive than snapshots. Because of those two reasons, we recommend using snapshots.