Hi everyone!
I’m Josh, and I product manage the team charged with making sure the DigitalOcean product experience meets, and hopefully exceeds, your expectations.
To that end, we're rolling out the ability for everyone to enable backups for existing Droplets, or turn them back on if they were previously disabled. We know many of you have been asking for this feature for a long time. We hope it helps.
Currently this feature is active in the Web control panel, and will be added to the API in the next few days.
To turn backups on, simply navigate to any Droplet page, click the Backups tab in the left column (it's below Settings and above Graphs), and you should see a big blue button to "Enable Backups." Click it, and you should be good to go.
Our team plans on delivering a lot more features in the future, and we'd love to hear from you.
If you have any questions or input, feel free to reach out to me personally at jviney@digitalocean.com
Thanks for your patience!
- Josh
I remember once upon a time ago backups and snapshots were quite convenient on DO, but not anymore today. Snapshots have to be taken when Droplets are powered off, and backups can not even be enabled if they were not enabled at first. Quite disappointed, confused and stressed.
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I didn't even realize that I couldn't turn on the auto backup once I had created the droplet until I saw this suggestion. I didn't select the autobackups when I create the droplet since I knew that I was going to spend some time building and fine tuning it.
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If you create a droplet, then create a snapshot and go to spin up a new droplet based on the snapshot, can you not then enable backups since it is a new droplet based on the snapshot? If not, adding backups later is important.
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Additionally, at the moment you can't even see on the Droplet info page whether or not backups are enabled.
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If backups aren't enabled then you won't have a 'Backups' tab on the droplet info page.
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We need to add auto backup enabling after creating an instance.
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IS this true? I need to enable backups
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I found this question when looking at why I could not enable backups for my droplets. This is so basic it should have been implemented a long long time ago. WTF?
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Agree! Pls add backup on feature after droplet created!
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Please make it possible to enable backups after droplet creation and after backup disabling.
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This is ridiculous. Only found out about this after I'd already set up my server. AT LEAST give us a warning when we're creating a new droplet that backups CANNOT BE ENABLED LATER! Ugh.
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I've just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to enable Backups. The documentation shows a Backups tab in the droplet. I can't believe that I can't turn this on for a running droplet!
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Agreed, it's pretty silly that I would have to do the following and MAYBE my IP will stay the same.
1) create a snapshot of your server
2) delete your server to release the IP
3) immediately after the delete is finished, create a new droplet, choose the same datacenter, and in the "select images" section switch to "my images" and select your snapshot. Then check the "Enable Backups" box.
This server will almost always capture the IP just released.
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It is an essential feature: I got very disappointed when I discovered that I couldn't enable backups!
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Very bummed this isn't possible.
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This feature is definitely a must have
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I ended up using the snapshot and spin up a new instance with backups enabled back in January. Ideally it would've been better not to do that, but it worked. It would also be nice to be able to have a "manual backup now" button so you do not have to shut down the server to do a snapshot.
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this is a very important feature to have!
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Please make this an option as soon as possible! It's baffling that this isn't possible, and I'm no expert in all virtualization technologies but if VMware has allowed hot snapshots since forever, I'm surprised and disappointed that the hip and modern DO does not.
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Yep. Add it.
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