Thanks Josh, and Serge, and all the DigitalOcean team; I Love the updates, that you all care, and are constantly improving your product

ThankS!

Great job! :D

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 agree that this should be user controllable -- however, I opened a ticket with DO support to reserve my IP while I recreated my droplet in order to enable backups and I was told that while this is not possible in the DO control panel, DO support can do it from their end -- they enabled backups on my droplet immediately -- didn't even need to power down.

You must be kidding.
The backups started having problems. So I disabled them assuming I could enable them again.
There wasn't even a warning that this would kill all backups.

+1 yes!

Must required feature. I am currently in this situation and accidently disabled the backups :(

This is actually a joke... Good by DO, wish you lots of luck.

It is stunning that we can't enable this on an existing droplet. This really needs addressing.

Also, backups can't be downloaded? Your backup system needs serious work.

Yes, please implement :-)

This a bummer and needs fixing pronto!

This is a very serious limitation. I was all excited by your offering but this shortcoming is a downer.

Yes!

Yes, this is a very important function for user experience!

Please guys, this really is needed.

Not just be able to turn it on off but also have a schedule, instead of "periodic" backups we should be able to choose daily, weekly, or monthly. For me I only need weekly, and it would be nice to know that it's backed up ever Sunday rather than have it be random and not know whether to panic or not when something goes wrong.

Very disappointed to find this out now. It should be made very clear when creating a droplet that the backup option is a once in a droplet opportunity not to be missed! Please add this option soon!

Extremely important and useful.

yes please, +100

Extremely important! +3!

This is a must have for many of our use cases. Please do it!

Would really like this feature...

Must have option

OMG We need this ASAP!! +1

It's a little strange this capability is missing.

+1 Need it

Need it!

Yes please!

Good!

Yep at the very least we need a warning on the tooltip before its too late to change your mind

Wow. At least warn us that we can't turn this on at a later date when we're creating droplets. Boo.

So... I was spending time looking all over the place for a way to enable backups, and finally ended up here. This is a much needed feature. I spun up many instances with different OS configs and had no idea which one I would actually end up using. Now I have everything completely operational, and I can't enable backups? Let me put this another way: I would like to give you 20% more money... but you won't let me. ;-)

Oh shitty shit! How can we live without the feature?! Please, do!

Yes, please... This is really annoying.

It is a really important feature ! It is a Hotfix !

This is an important feature. I've just tried to enable them on an important droplet of mine but found that I can't.

Wow. Not even a warning when creating the droplet that you won't be able to enable backups later. Kinda wasted a bunch of my time, thanks for that.

It's mind-blowing that this isn't available.

This is sorely needed!

This is the worst, I would really like to see a fix for this.

Please add - I miss this :/

Just wanted to let folks on this thread know that I took the risk and tried the suggestion to:
1) Make snapshot
2) Delete droplet
3) Create new droplet right away using the snapshot
4) Enable backups during the new droplet creation process

Happy to report I did retain the same IP address and everything seems to be working swimmingly. Total down time was 15 minutes

This is just essential. You should implement it as soon as possible.

I also want to know if this ability is considered by you. Or should i risk taking snapshot, losing my IP and then changing it on other SaaS, waiting for DNS...
If it aint gonna happen let us know so we can plan.

I think this is essential option. I did not enable backup when i was creating my droplet because i know that i spend some time creating configuration, moving data... right now after testing configuration , i have deploy IP to all dns server propagated that and... i cant turn backup on... :/

I have had a droplet with backups turned on but I turned it off ..and I can't turn it on again. Please at least add the possibility to REenable backups!

Be very nice to have.

Yes, please add this.

Absolutely, this is core. I've just discovered backups weren't enabled on a business-critical server, snapshotting and recreating this (and hoping IP doesn't change or anything else will go wrong, as a kernel foobar did recently when we tried this) is an unacceptable risk.

Yep. Add it.

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.

this is a very important feature to have!

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.

This feature is definitely a must have

Very bummed this isn't possible.

It is an essential feature: I got very disappointed when I discovered that I couldn't enable backups!

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.

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!

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.

Please make it possible to enable backups after droplet creation and after backup disabling.

Agree! Pls add backup on feature after droplet created!

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?

IS this true? I need to enable backups

We need to add auto backup enabling after creating an instance.

If backups aren't enabled then you won't have a 'Backups' tab on the droplet info page.

Additionally, at the moment you can't even see on the Droplet info page whether or not backups are enabled.

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.

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.

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.