SnapShooter How-Tos

SnapShooter is a cloud backup and recovery solution. Use SnapShooter to back up servers, volumes, databases, and applications from DigitalOcean and other cloud providers.


Connect Cloud Provider Accounts

To use SnapShooter to manage native backups, you need to connect your cloud provider account to your SnapShooter account.

You can connect any number of DigitalOcean teams to a single SnapShooter account to set up daily or hourly backups for Droplets and volumes on those teams.
Connect accounts from other cloud providers (like Amazon, Google, Hetzner, Exoscale, and Vultr) to SnapShooter to set up daily or hourly backups for servers and other resources.

Configure Native Backups

Back up DigitalOcean Droplets daily or hourly with SnapShooter. SnapShooter uses the DigitalOcean API via OAuth authentication to take backups and prune them on your behalf.
Back up DigitalOcean Volumes Block Storage daily or hourly with SnapShooter. SnapShooter uses the DigitalOcean API via OAuth authentication to take backups and prune them on your behalf.
Use SnapShooter to manage daily or hourly native backups for servers from other supported cloud providers, like Amazon, Exoscale, and Hetzner.

Connect Servers and Storage Providers

To use SnapShooter’s backup jobs, you need to connect servers to SnapShooter either through a direct SSH connection or via the SnapShooter Agent. If you don’t want to use SnapShooter Simple Storage, you can connect another S3-based storage provider.

Connect servers directly to SnapShooter to set up backup jobs, which run using SnapShooter’s custom engine to back up hosted resources (like files, databases, and applications) to your chosen S3-based storage provider.
Use the SnapShooter Agent to connect SnapShooter to private resources that are behind a NAT gateway or firewall.
Set up DigitalOcean Spaces Object Storage as your SnapShooter storage provider to save backup files to a Spaces bucket.
Set up other storage providers, like AWS S3, Google Drive, or Dropbox, to store SnapShooter backup files.

Configure Backup Jobs

Use SnapShooter to automatically create a full or incremental backup of your server files, compress it, and schedule future backups.
Use SnapShooter to restore data backed up by SnapShooter backup jobs. A restore wizard helps you configure and start the restoration process.
How to Add Pre- and Post-Backup Scripts for SnapShooter Backup Jobs
You can write scripts to perform actions before and after SnapShooter backup jobs, like closing a file-based database before a backup and reopening it after the backup.

Database Servers

Use SnapShooter to automatically create backups for a PostgreSQL database server and store them in S3-based storage of your choice.
Use SnapShooter to automatically create backups for a MySQL database server and store them in S3-based storage of your choice.
Use SnapShooter to automatically create backups for a MongoDB database server and store them in S3-based storage of your choice.

Application Servers

Use SnapShooter to automatically create compressed backups for your WordPress database and website directory and transfer them automatically to S3-based storage of your choice.
Use SnapShooter to automatically create compressed backups for your Laravel database and website directory and transfer them automatically to S3-based storage of your choice.