Provide the ability to turn backups on or off after a

Provide the ability to turn backups on or off after a droplet has been created

Currently if a droplet is created without automatic backups enabled, the option to backup that droplet becomes unavailable. This should be something we can turn on and off at any time.

Alex

Sep 11 2018

Shipped

Sep 11, 2018

Admin response

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

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Wang Guoqin commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Marc Isaacson commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Chris Riley commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Theron Luhn commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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

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Teshoo Lama commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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

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Babos Csaba commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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

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Laurence commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

IS this true? I need to enable backups

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Mladen Maravic commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Станислав Бирюков commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

Agree! Pls add backup on feature after droplet created!

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Anonymous commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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

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DeltaHF commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Jeremy Haile commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Alex Kinnee commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Marco Colli commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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

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Sean Hess commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

Very bummed this isn't possible.

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Enrique Moreno commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

This feature is definitely a must have

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Chris Riley commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Dan commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

this is a very important feature to have!

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Steve Lamotte commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

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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Jon Roket commented

11 Sep, 2018 05:42pm

Yep. Add it.

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