do-snap

DigitalOcean currently offers weekly automated backups for Droplets. However, you might want to back up your Droplets more frequently. do-snap is a serverless function that can be deployed on DigitalOcean to take periodic snapshots of a Droplet. It accepts the Droplet ID and a personal access token as input and uses a cron schedule as a trigger. By default, it runs every 6 hours, and you can adjust the frequency.

Operational logic

do-snap connects to the DigitalOcean API and accesses your account using the provided personal access token. It takes a snapshot of the specified Droplet and deletes an old snapshot, ensuring that only a single snapshot copy is retained at all times.

Prerequisites

To use do-snap, you'll need:

• The latest version of doctl with the serverless software installed.
• A serverless namespace created and connected to doctl.
• A personal access token generated for using the DigitalOcean API.
• The Droplet ID or a list of comma-separated Droplet IDs that you want to back up. You can retrieve the Droplet ID.

How to deploy

1. Clone this GitHub repository to your local machine.

git clone https://github.com/vprokopov-do/do-snap

2. Modify project.yml:

• Replace the environment variable token with your personal access token. See the next section below for the project.yml example.
• Replace the environment variable droplets with your Droplet ID or list of comma-separated Droplet IDs.
• Optionally, rename a Function and a Trigger to names that make sense to you.

3. Important: Rename the "your-function-name" directory to match your Function name (if you renamed a Function in step 2).

do-snap
├── project.yml
└── packages
    └── do-snap
        └── your-droplet-name
            └── snap.py

4. Optionally, modify project.yaml to adjust the cron schedule (it runs every 6 hours by default).
5. Use doctl to Deploy the Function on DigitalOcean.

doctl serverless deploy do-snap

Note that you need to run the deploy command on the entire cloned-down folder.

Example project.yml

Contact

If you wish to learn more about DigitalOcean's services, feel free to contact me at vprokopov@digitalocean.com. You are also welcome to reach out to the sales team at sales@digitalocean.com. A global team of talented engineers will be happy to provide assistance.