Cloudron Forum

A server snapshot is useful to recover quickly. But a backup is quite separate :

Backups are generally separate from your server provider. If you lose access to AWS (maybe they think you are a bad actor or a billing failure makes them kill everything, this happened to me), then backups are a way for you to recover. Snapshots are almost always in the same server provider.

Backups are portable . You can't take a EBS snapshot and put it in Digitalocean

On Cloudron, backups are per app. So, you can restore each app individually unlike a server snapshot which will roll back everything.

Backups help in upgrading things. For example, you can upgrade/migrate database using backup of old version into new version.

So, they have different use cases. Both are useful. Use both when possible.

@philkunz We use the term snapshot and backup interchangeably in the docs. They are one and the same. I guess snapshot is something you initiate as a user whereas backup is something the system (automatically) initiates.

Ultimately, they are both capturing the state of the app and uploading to configured backup location.

To answer the questions:

yes, backup policy applies to snapshots correct, snapshots (which you click manually) is just in addition to backups (which are taken automatically). there is nothing special about snapshots, we don't differentiate them from the automatic backups. We take snapshots/backups at the per app level. This way you can roll back a single app independent of others. To see the backups/snapshots of an app, you go to Backup section of the app. There is also a system backup (in the Backups view). A system backup is the one which you configure the schedule policy for (we don't have per app backup schedule). The system backup is essentially taking the backup of each app + backup of mail server + backup of the platform (like user information, domains etc) . It "groups" all these separate backups together and this is what is shown in the Backups view. In that sense, the Backups view is showing the "full backups". With the full backups, you can restore/migrate Cloudron to another server (so, it will be exactly the same as the current server with all the apps/domains/data/users).

@fbartels said in Backup Preference: Snapshot vs S3?:

Hi @jordanurbs,

the viability of snapshots for backup has for example been discussed in https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4161/disc-snapshots?_=1628139201934.

Yes, and to quote what @nebulon pointed out there:

@nebulon said in Disc snapshots:

Disk snapshots or VPS snapshots don't work well with Cloudron, since backups are per-app and not per-server on Cloudron. This is to be able to rollback/restore individual apps without interfering with the system or other apps running on it.

Still for a secondary fallback backup solution this can still be recommended.

That's what I do. I do Cloudron backups to a Hetzner Storage Box, plus pay Hetzner for their automated backups, plus occasionally do a snapshot too.

Although really I ought to backup to another provider too, to avoid the potential issues @girish once had with DO.

I'll probably choose another eco VPS provider to do that at some point https://ud.coop/ecovps