How to Automate Taking Digital Ocean Droplet Snaphot with DoSnapShot Script

If you are using Digital Ocean server, then here is step by step guide for taking automated snapshot of your Digital Ocean Droplet. If you are spending time on taking manual snapshot at regular interval, then this post is going to reduce that strain.

Things you are going Achieve After Reading this Post:

1. Automate taking Digital Ocean Droplet snapshot
2. You will learn How to Configure-how often and what time you need to take snapshot of your droplet
3. Specify how many droplet snapshot to keep on your Digital Ocean account
4. Automatically delete older snapshot from your digital ocean account
5. Once the snapshot process done it automatically Power On the Server

Requirements:

1. 2 Digital Ocean droplet:- One droplet is to run snapshot automation script 24*7 and another droplet is the digital ocean server which you need to take snapshot automatically.
2. Dosnapshot Script:- This is the script which we are going to use to take digital ocean snapshot automatically.
3. Digital Ocean Access API Tokens or Personal Access Tokens

Step by Step Instruction on setting up of DoSnapshot Script to automate Snapshot Process:

I hope by this time you already have 2 test digital ocean droplet. Now we need to get digital ocean “Personal Access Tokens”.

Get Digital Ocean Personal Access Tokens:

1. Go to Digital Ocean Application Settings page by navigating API >> Your Tokens >> and click on Generate New Token button
2. In the next step give some name for the access token. In this guide I’m going to keep “For backup script” and click on “Generate Token” button
3. In the Next Step you are going to get Personal Access Tokens to your Digital Ocean account. Copy and Keep it on somewhere safely, because you are not going to see that again.

So now we have Digital Ocean Access Tokens with us.

 

Install DOSnapshot and Configure on Server:

 

Before we start it, Lets understand what the server name points to which server. In the below image you will see 2 servers. One is Server-to-Backup and another is Automation-Script-Server.

Server-to-Backup: This is the server to take automated snapshot on scheduled timing.

Automation-Script-Server: This is the Server to which runs digital ocean automated snapshot script (DoSnapshot).

 

In this tutorial mostly we will deal with installing and setting up of DoSnapshot script, so open 2nd server i.e., Automation-Script-Server on SSH.

Dosnapshot requires Ruby on Rails to run that script. So now we are going to install Ruby on Rails on our Ubuntu Operating system (Ubuntu 14.04.3 x64).

Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 14.04:

1. Run the below command on SSH

gpg --keyserver hkp://keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 409B6B1796C275462A1703113804BB82D39DC0E3 \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails
 
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2. After executing the above command, it automatically adds below command as well. Just click Enter again
\curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails
 

3. After completion of that command execution have a look on last few lines. You will see some message saying

To start using RVM you need to run `source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm`
in all your open shell windows, in rare cases you need to reopen all shell windows.

so copy the above command and execute it as well.
source /usr/local/rvm/scripts/rvm
 

4. Run the below command to download dosnapshot script
wget https://assets.merqlove.ru.s3.amazonaws.com/do_snapshot/do_snapshot.tgz --no-check-certificate
 

5. Now execute below commands one by one

tar -xzf do_snapshot.tgz
cp -r do_snapshot /usr/local/
ln -s /usr/local/do_snapshot/bin/do_snapshot /usr/local/bin/do_snapshot
 

6. Now take the Droplet ID of the server which you need to take Backup. To get Droplet Id, Open the droplet link and take only numeric digits

https://cloud.digitalocean.com/droplets/9240401

In my case droplet ID is: 9240401

7. First we will try whether the script works or not by executing below command.


do_snapshot --digital-ocean-access-token e8470cf64355cdc1fc29700003aa9c6bc5 --only 9240401 -k 3 -c -v
 

Make sure you replace my digital ocean access token and droplet ID with your’s.

If everything works fine, then this script should take snapshot of the droplet ID which you provided in the command.

 

Let’s Automate Taking Snapshot using Cron Job

Once command successfully started working manually, now we will schedule cron job to do work for us. Before setting cronjob we need to run two more commands. Execute below commands one by one.
gem install rest-client
rvm cron setup
 

once you done that. Open crontab by executing below command.
crontab -e
 

scroll down to the bottom of the page and and place the below command on it.
40 13 * * * do_snapshot --digital-ocean-access-token e8470cf64355cdc1fc29700003aa9c6bc5 --only 9240401 -k 3 -c -v

 

Press Ctrl+X to save and exit.

Explanation of the above command.

40 13 * * * –> Every day at 13th Hour, 40 Minute command is going to execute

e8470cf64355cdc1fc29700003aa9c6bc5 –> Your digital ocean personal access token

9240401 –> Digital Ocean Droplet ID which you need to take snapshot

-k 3 –> Keeps latest 3 Snapshot and deletes more than 3 snapshot

 

10. That’s it. From now onwards you server will keep taking automated snapshot as per your scheduled timings.

DoSnapshot offers little more options, feel free to experiment with those options if you really want extra options.

If you have any doubts in this post, then feel free to post in comments. I will try to help.

 

Video Guide:

Resources: Digital Ocean | DoSnapshot | Digital Ocean Project Page | longren Guide