Snapshots

Snapshots capture the current disk state of a virtual machine. Snapshots can be taken while your VM is online, with no downtime.

After a snapshot is taken, you can use it in several ways:

• Create new virtual machines from the snapshot.
• Re-image an existing VM with the snapshot.
• Download the snapshot from the panel.

Thus, snapshots are most often used for backups or to clone a VM.

Pricing

Snapshots are $0.03/GB/mo, billed hourly. For example, if you have a 100 GB snapshot for ten days (1/3 of a month), you'll be charged $1.00.

Using Snapshots with Block Storage

You can use our infrastructure to transfer data from snapshots to block storage, and from block storage to snapshots:

• Snapshots to block storage: select the snapshot when creating a new volume. This is useful to move an existing VM's boot device to a high availability volume.
• Block storage to snapshots: select the volume, and press Convert to Image. One use case is downloading a volume (you can download the image after the conversion completes).

When you take a snapshot of a VM where the boot device is on a volume, our system will produce an image snapshot.

If you want to copy a volume onto additional volumes, or to snapshot a volume that is not the boot device, you can take a volume snapshot instead, by selecting the volume and then pressing Snapshot.

More Details

Taking a Snapshot

1. Select a VM, and press Snapshot.
2. After the snapshot operation begins, you can monitor progress by selecting the snapshot from Images.
3. Once the operation completes, you can create new VMs from the snapshot, re-image an existing VM with the snapshot, or download the snapshot.

Snapshotting VMs that were Provisioned from ISO Images

Before snapshotting a VM that was provisioned from an ISO installation image, the VM needs to be configured to boot to the disk and not the CD-ROM device. This can be done by pressing Swap Boot Order.

Cloning a VM

Our templates come with cloud-init, a software system that automatically reconfigures a VM when it first boots.

This makes cloning easy: when you create a VM from a snapshot, cloud-init will reconfigure SSH, network interface settings, user accounts, the hostname, partitions, etc.

One caveat is that user account passwords may be reset by cloud-init. You may need to select Set Password via cloud-init when provisioning the VM from a snapshot if you are authenticating with passwords.

Replicating Snapshots across Regions

You can replicate a snapshot between our cloud platform locations by selecting the snapshot from Images, and then pressing Replicate.