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DigitalOcean
Droplet snapshots that fire while you sleep
VPS Snaps calls the same snapshot action you would click in the DigitalOcean control panel, on the schedule you set, and deletes the images that fall out of your retention window.
Backup Jobs
Automated backup schedules
postgres-main nightly
Last run 6h ago
web-01 snapshots
Last run 9h ago
api-prod volumes
Last run 4m ago
staging-db weekly
Last run 3d ago
Connecting DigitalOcean
OAuth connection
Sign in with DigitalOcean and authorize VPS Snaps. There is a manual token path too, if you would rather issue and hold your own credential.
No Droplet yet? You will need one before there is anything to snapshot. VPS Snaps connects to it the moment it exists.
Create a DigitalOcean accountAffiliate link — we earn a commission if you sign up.
Click Connect DigitalOcean and authorize VPS Snaps in the window that opens. That is the whole OAuth path — no token to copy anywhere.
Prefer a token you control? In DigitalOcean go to API → Tokens → Generate New Token and select Read and Write scopes.
Paste the token into the manual form. Either way, VPS Snaps immediately lists the Droplets it can see so you can confirm the credential works.
What one connection reaches
One connection reaches every Droplet in the account you authorized, in every region — there is nothing region-specific to configure.
What one run actually produces
No proprietary format and no copy on our side. VPS Snaps makes the same API call you could make yourself, and records what DigitalOcean gave back.
Droplet snapshot
POST /v2/droplets/{id}/actions { "type": "snapshot" }- What it covers
- The whole Droplet, exactly as DigitalOcean defines a Droplet snapshot — the same image you would get from the control panel button.
- How consistent it is, honestly
- The Droplet is never powered off. DigitalOcean's own guidance is to shut down first for a perfectly clean image; VPS Snaps takes the crash-consistent one rather than interrupting a running server.
And what happens to the old ones
After each successful run, snapshots from runs older than your retention window are removed with DELETE /v2/snapshots/{id}. A snapshot that is already gone (404) counts as deleted rather than as an error.
Cleanup runs only after a run has already succeeded, so a failing schedule never deletes the last good copy you have. Every deletion is written into that run’s log with the date of the backup it removed.
VPS Snaps stores the ID and the name of each image it creates — never the image itself. Close your account and every copy already taken stays exactly where it is, in your DigitalOcean account.
DigitalOcean specifics worth knowing first
Every provider does this differently, and the differences are the part that bites at 3am. These are the ones that changed how the integration had to be built.
The snapshot is an action, not a resource
DigitalOcean answers the request with an action ID, not a snapshot. VPS Snaps polls /v2/actions/{id} every 20 seconds for up to 20 minutes, and only once it reports completed does it look the finished snapshot up by name to record its real ID against the run.
OAuth grants expire, and you get told
If the authorization lapses, the run does not fail with a vague API error. It fails with "DigitalOcean connection has expired — reconnect it from Providers to resume backups," which is the one sentence that tells you what to do about it.
DigitalOcean bills the snapshot storage, not us
Snapshots sit in your DigitalOcean account and are charged per GB by DigitalOcean. That is exactly why retention cleanup runs automatically — an unattended hourly job with no pruning is a bill, not a backup strategy.
FAQs
Can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Reach out to our support team.
Does taking a snapshot slow the Droplet down?
DigitalOcean does the work on its side, so nothing runs on your Droplet and no VPS Snaps process touches it. You may see some disk contention while the image is being written, which is why most people schedule snapshots for a quiet hour. The Droplet stays up and serving traffic throughout.
Can I restore a snapshot without VPS Snaps?
Yes, and that is the point of using the provider's own API. The snapshots are ordinary DigitalOcean snapshots in your account: create a new Droplet from one, or restore an existing Droplet onto it, straight from the control panel or doctl. Cancel VPS Snaps tomorrow and every image you have already taken is still there and still yours.
Do I need the OAuth path, or is a token fine?
Both work. OAuth means nothing sensitive is ever pasted anywhere and the grant can be revoked from DigitalOcean's side. A personal access token needs Read and Write scope, is stored sealed with AES-256-GCM, and is the better option if your organisation would rather issue a credential it can audit and rotate on its own schedule.
Running on more than one of these?
Connections are additive and independent — a Hetzner project and an AWS region live side by side in the same workspace, on the same schedules and the same run history.
A snapshot restores a Droplet on DigitalOcean and nowhere else. For a copy you can carry anywhere, add a database, file or Docker job on the same Droplet — those write plain .tar.gz and .sql.gz into an S3-compatible bucket you own.
Powerful features to give you peace of mind
Rest easy knowing your data and your reputation are safe.
- Bring your own storage
- Backups land in your own S3-compatible bucket — Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, or plain S3. You hold the keys and the data.
- Snapshots stay with your provider
- Provider snapshots are created through the provider's own API and never leave your account. We store the snapshot ID, not the image.
- Seven providers, one dashboard
- DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Vultr, Linode, AWS EC2, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure — scheduled and reviewed from the same place.
- Schedules that fit your traffic
- Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or a fixed interval in minutes — anchored to your timezone, so a 02:00 job stays at 02:00 across a DST change.
- Retention that prunes itself
- Set how many days to keep. Older snapshots and archives are cleaned up after each successful run, so storage bills stay flat.
- Step-by-step run logs
- Every run records what it did, in order, with warnings and errors kept in place — so a failure tells you which step broke.
- Complete run history
- Status, duration, byte size, and what triggered each run, kept per job. Proof the backup ran, long after the night it ran.
- Checksummed on upload
- Every archive is hashed as it streams to your bucket and the checksum is stored with the run, so you can verify what landed.
- Run on demand
- Trigger any job by hand before a migration or a risky deploy, without touching its schedule or its retention window.
- Alerts on five channels
- Email plus Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and Discord — on success, on failure, and on a job that missed its schedule entirely.
- Encrypted credentials
- SSH keys, database passwords, and storage secrets are sealed with AES-256-GCM before they touch the database.
- Team access with roles
- Invite your team into a shared workspace as owner, admin, or member, so backups outlive whoever set them up.
“The biggest advantage for us is that VPS Snaps works with the infrastructure we already have instead of forcing us into a proprietary backup environment. Provider snapshots stay inside our cloud account, while database and file archives can go directly into our own bucket.”
Schedule your first DigitalOcean backup tonight.
Connect the account, pick a Droplet, set a schedule and a retention window. The first run is what proves the credential has the scope it needs — a much better thing to discover on a quiet evening.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.