Download and Backup Digital Ocean Snapshot Images

Download and Backup Digital Ocean Snapshot Images

NOTE!: I haven’t had time to test going back and restoring. I am hesitant to remove my images from DigitalOcean until I can confirm the backup is working properly. I’ve been holding back on posting this until then, but I’m tired of sitting on this and hope it helps others.

I am not responsible for any data loss or harm you or another may cause to your system or data.

Add an SSH Key to your account

Use PuttyGen to generate a key, save the public and private

Add the key to DO

Create New Droplet

Create a droplet from the snapshot image you want to download

Remember to check the key you created

You may need to choose a larger storage space if you’re going to create a backup locally.

Validate Previous SSH Settings

If you disabled logging in from root, you’ll need to reset the root password from the DO pannel.

Then log in with the DO console and edit the

/etc/ssh/sshd_config
Enable PermitRootLogin yes

Then add this line below

PermitRootLogin without-password

Make sure if you’re white-listing users you either add root or comment the line out

#AllowUsers UserName root

Restart the SSH server with

service ssh restart

Now if you’ve added your SSH key to Digital Ocean and the droplet when you created it you should be able to connect with Putty.

Connecting with Putty

Add IP, Connection > Data > Auto Login Username: root

Add your private key, Connection > SSH > Auth > Private Key File > Browse

Connect, enter your passphrase you created when you generated the SSH Key

You should see something like:

Authenticated with public key "Digitatl-Ocean-rsa-key-#######"

Passphrase for key "Digital-Ocean-rsa-key-#######:"

Optional (Recommended) – Create Serverside Backup

You can choose to zip everything up on the server if you’d like or just copy it all over in the next step

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/132797/how-to-dd-a-remote-disk-using-ssh-on-local-machine-and-save-to-a-local-disk

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DriveImaging You can use the BZ compression if you want, I chose gzip.

at the root with root permissions run

dd if=/dev/vda1 | gzip > backup.gz

vda1 can be found via:

ls /dev/disk/by-label/ -l

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10555066/watch-file-size-on-linux

You can watch the progress with another terminal and the following command; remove the h if you want to watch the bytes

watch -n 3 “du -h backup.gz”

 

Exclude or include only specific files:

exclude from file:
https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/tar_49.html

include from file:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8033857/tar-archiving-that-takes-input-from-a-list-of-files

 

What to include?

This askubuntu has a good answer
http://askubuntu.com/questions/222326/which-folders-to-include-in-backup

List packages:
http://askubuntu.com/a/55906/104223

From Article

/var (except /var/run, /var/cache, /var/tmp)
/srv
/etc
/root
/home
/usr (/usr/local only, nothing else)

You can also install NCDU
https://codyswartz.us/wp/linux/linux-find-out-how-much-each-folder-is-taking-up

and determine which folders are your big hitters for a better idea

Top file sizes on a small server

Include File

nano my-includes.txt


/usr
/var
/lib
/etc
/root
/home
/srv
/opt

Exclude File

nano my-excludes.txt

/backups
/boot
/run
/var/run
/var/cache
/var/tmp
/var/lib/apt/lists
/lib/modules
/usr/share
/usr/src
/usr/lib
/usr/bin
/usr/sbin

Just configs no executables

/backups
/boot
/run
/var/run
/var/cache
/var/tmp
/var/lib/apt/lists
/bin
/lib
/lib64
/sbin
/usr/share
/usr/src
/usr/lib
/usr/bin
/usr/sbin

Time To Backup

Lets build a big scary backup command!

mkdir backups

dpkg --get-selections > app-list.txt

tar -cvpjf /backups/backup-$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S).tar.bz2 --one-file-system / -X my-excludes.txt -T my-includes.txt --hard-dereference

Windows WinSCP

Copy file from server

Final Steps

Take a deep breath and pull the trigger…

Remove those snapshots from Digital Ocean… Phew

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