Enabling backups at DigitalOcean will create a snapshot of your Droplet once a week.

But, what if you have a dynamic website and data keeps changing?

A weekly backup will not be enough and you need to look for daily backup options.

At Bobcares, we help cloud owners to set up daily backups for their DigitalOcean Droplets as part of our Managed Cloud Services.

Today, we’ll see the top challenges in DigitalOcean daily backup setup and how our Cloud Engineers fix them.

Why do we need daily backup?

First of all, let’s see why enabling weekly backup in DigitalOcean Droplet will not be enough.

1. Freshness of data

In data recovery, it is ideal to restore from the latest saved data. This would include maximum changes in the files.

Unfortunately, when we recover a DigitalOcean Droplet from weekly backup, we will have a data set that is at least 6 days old. For database driven busy websites, this may cause considerable difference in the data.

That explains why daily backup is more ideal.

2. Restoring individual file

Similarly, when going with the DigitalOcean weekly backup, it actually creates a snapshot of the entire Droplet. These snapshot functions as an image and you can’t restore any specific file or database. Therefore, during a restore, its something like all or nothing.

Also, when you need to restore a single file in a website, you would need to revert all websites or the entire server. This becomes a real problem in live servers with busy websites.

That’s why, our Cloud Engineers recommend customers to enable per website backup daily.

How to setup DigitalOcean Daily backup

Now, let’s see how we set up daily backup in DigitalOcean Droplets.

The backup process involves 3 steps.

1.Content backup

First process in the daily backup setup is website content backup. Any website backup should include the web files, folder, databases and the mails. When cloud customers approach us for backup solutions, our Support Engineers set up all the website backups using custom shell scripts.

We primarily use the tar command to create a compressed backup file for each website. It also include the backup file of the MySQL databases taken using the mysqldump utility. The backup script generates the backup of all websites and store it in a central location on the server.

2. Scheduling the backup

As the next step, we schedule the time at which the backup script runs on the server. Luckily, linux job scheduling utility called cron jobs come handy here. We set the backup time after considering the customer requirements.

3. Offsite backup

Again, storing backup on the same server is always a risk. We do not have anything to restore during an entire Droplet crash. That’s why our Cloud Engineers always copy the backup to remote storage locations like Amazon S3, Google Drive, backup server, and so on.

Common mistakes in DigitalOcean Daily backup

From our experience in handling DigitalOcean Droplets, we often see problems with backups on the servers. Let’s take a look at the top reasons for the errors.

1. Choosing peak time for backup

Backup process itself involves copying and compressing files. And, it takes considerable processing power of the server.

Suppose, this backup is run at a peak time when your websites have too many visitors. Then, that will cause heavy load on the server and can even result in a server crash.

Therefore, our Cloud Engineers always schedule the backup at off peak hours so that it doesn’t affect server load.

2. Backup location

Similarly, server owners often keep the backup in the same Droplet. This causes a single point failure. That is, when the server crashes, even the backups will not be available.

To workaround this, we suggest customers to copy the backup to remote location, or to a different Droplet in a different region.

3. Server resources

Just as we saw, the entire backup script consumes considerable amount of server memory. Also, the disk space on the server should be enough to hold the websites backup and original content.

That’s why, prior to backup implementation, our Support Engineers always ensure that the DigitalOcean Droplet has enough memory and disk space.

[Looking for backup solutions? We can setup daily backup in your DigitalOcean Droplet.]

Conclusion

Maintaining daily backups in DigitalOcean servers really helps for quick and easier data recovery. Today, we’ve seen how our Cloud Engineers manually set up DigitalOcean daily backup considering the probable failure points.