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
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.