Backup DigitalOcean droplet locally

backup_digitalocean.md

DigitalOcean does not provide a way to download a snapshot of your droplet locally. You can use rsync to accomplish this instead.

On your local machine, assuming you have added your-server in your SSH config:

rsync -aAXHv --append-verify --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} your-server:/

• -a : archive mode (all files, with permissions, etc.)
• -A : preserve ACLs/permissions (not included with -a)
• -X : preserve extended attributes (not included with -a)
• -H : preserve hard links (not included with -a)
• -v : verbose, mention files
• --append-verify: if the files differ in modification or other timestamps, it will overwrite the target with the source without scrutinizing those files further

Very useful my friend, thank you 😊

On macos I had to slightly modify the command (note the ./ in the end that specifies dst folder):

rsync --recursive --ignore-existing --progress --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} root@ip:/ ./

Great work - thanks. I was just looking how to do this.

This didn't exclude the files that were told to exclude for me. I had to create a new file (exclude.txt) listing the folders to be excluded

/dev/*
/proc/*
/sys/*
/tmp/*
/run/*
/mnt/*
/media/*
/lost+found

and then change to rsync command to:
rsync --recursive --ignore-existing --progress --exclude-from='exclude.txt' root@ip:/ ./

Thanks!

you wont be able to restore a droplet with this can you?

I was looking to store a pre-configured droplet I dont need know to be able to lateron restore it easily.
Linode supports this digitealocean are criminals to letting us not do this, ofcourse it will hurt there business.

Thanks mate!

Thanks!

is it possible to restore ?

Also there is opportunity to determine non standard port and other options of ssh connection With -e option. Like this
rsync -avz -e "ssh -p 2222 -i ~/keysForLocalNet/id_rsa -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" --progress
[email protected]:/initrd/mnt/dev_save/raspupsave-1/ ./

is it possible to restore ?

If you wish to restore a backup, use the same rsync command that was executed but with the source and destination reversed

Please be mindful that this is suitable for local and stand-alone systems only. If your system is being actively accessed by some other systems on the network, it is not a better solution.

Because, the contents of the systems might be constantly updated every minute, and some files may change during the rsync process.

In such cases, a snapshot-based backup is the better approach. Because the system will get "froze" before the backup process starts and get it "unfreeze" when the backup process finishes, so all the files are consistent.

And you must have same fs types in source and destination to avoid errors

In SSH config, would your-server need to be defined with root access? If not, then the root-owned files without world-read set would not be copied?
Many servers will be configured to deny root access via SSH.