Useful to snapshot volume if Cloudron backups are enabled?

[sparkwise]

(Hosting Cloudron on AWS.) With Cloudron managing system backups to S3 so nicely, I haven't set up volume-level snapshotting on our underlying EC2 storage. Reflecting on this now, and I'm curious to hear if there are failure scenarios that others have run into where this additional layer would be needed.

[michaelpope]

Snapshots are just a secondary way to preserve your system. Let's say someone breached your VPS, trashed it, and managed to grab the key to your backups, and then went an trashed your backups (This would take a very determined actor, but let's suppose). You could role back to a previous snapshot most of the time (however snapshots while a VPS is running live can boot up to a broken system sometimes).

As a note, some backup providers also do snapshotting, which would allow you to recover your backups even if someone went in and thrashed them (rsync.net does this for instance).

You'll need to decide how much protection is important for you. Just keep in mind that snapshots are not a backup, just like RAID isn't a backup either :).

[girish]

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.