Commence your backups
May 24, 2018•336 words
DigitalOcean has been my favorite VPS hosting provider for over half a decade. Their implementation of spinning up server instances is as easy as it gets and takes merely seconds out of my ridiculous worklife. I try and take advantage of all the services/features they offer. I've increased usage and prioritization of three of these features: snapshots, backups and third-party access. If you're like me and curious as to the difference between snapshots and backups: The main difference between the two is that snapshots can be generated manually, while backups are run automatically weekly.
As of recenly, I've commenced improvement upon one of my digital bad habits: I never seem to get around to generating backups of my DO droplets. Although automating this process may be trivial to some, it's always seemed tedious to me; luckily DO comes to the rescue and provides an easy way to do it from the droplet's dashboard with a simple click of the mouse... but for a small price of $1.00 per month (for scheduled backups, not manual snapshots). It's a small price, but I'm cheap and I don't want to pay it. Combining snapshots with third-party access is the golden ticket. That's when my new friend gets involved.
BackupSheep's free tier only allows for 1 backup schedule, but they don't limit features between the tiers. They provide a way for you to easily link your hosting provider(s) to their service. I actually prefer using BackupSheep as an alternative to DigitalOcean's native backups because of the flexibility and the amount of features they provide. You can store the backups on your own storage (Bring-Your-Own-Storage): AWS, DropBox, Google Drive, etc. They provide timezone-aware schedules, compression of backups, 2FA, SSH access, and the list goes on. I began using them this month and so far every backup has been successful and are taken within the minute of the time I scheduled.
If you're interested in DigitalOcean and/or BackupSheep, please show me love by signing-up using my referral links: