How to back up your Hubs instance
These instructions are written for users, newbies, or non-developers. These instructions only apply to single-node clusters, where data is stored on the node ("hostPath" volumes). If you arrived here from the Beginner’s Guide which guided you generally to a one node setup, you are fine to follow these.
Why would I need to create backups of my Hubs instance?
The Beginner’s Guide instructions and Hubs code have persistent volumes already turned on to store all of your data between DigitalOcean (DO) pod reboots. But if your node(s) get turned off or if DO screws up, you might lose all of your data. It has been known to happen.
Backups allow you to have copies so that you can restore your Hubs instance. This will save all of your instances, your avatars, and your projects in Spoke, your assets in Spoke, and will save pinned objects in room in the location where you pinned them.
A backup of your Hubs instance stores all of those files into one thing– the backup. You cannot sort or clean out from within the back up. You can’t clean out old files that you know you don’t want. It’s an all or nothing type of thing.
Prices
With DigitalOcean, you have two choices to make backups: Backups or Snapshots.
Backups are an automated system. It saves the backup for you at a time you select.
- Weekly backups - kept for 4 weeks. $4.80/month (20% of the droplet)
- Daily backups - kept for 7 days $7.20/month (30% of cost of droplet)
Snapshots are a one-time save on demand.
- Snapshots - rate $0.06 per GiB per month, you do these on demand, they are not automatic
Note: these prices are only quotes as of November 2024. With all of these DO quotes, the costs are dependent on either what droplet costs you are paying or how much you have saved in memory (gigabytes).
At DO, both Backups and Snapshots save ONE backup of everything within DO’s own computers. What you pay for is either the frequency of automatic saving (for Backups) or the file space (for Snapshots).
Which should I pick, Backups or Snapshots?
Backups make sense if you are a medium-to-heavy user of Hubs or if your use is critical. For example, if you are a college professor and you have 25 student projects coming due all at once through your Hubs, you might want Daily Backups. If you are a solo user, but your project has high value (like an art showing or a work meeting) you might want Daily or Weekly Backups.
Snapshots make more sense if you are a light user of Hubs. If you can remember to save and put a copy away and if it doesn’t bother you to lose some of your Hubs work in-between when you remember to save, snapshots might be better for you.
💡 Tip: Snapshots do backup volumes. Automated backups do not. These are not persistent volumes; these are extra volumes for off node storage that a user might purchase.
Both Backups and Snapshots work the same in DO. You set up the service. It runs. It’s nearly one-click to restore your work from Backup. You are NOT saving anything to your own computer. Because these are saved in a different place than your personal droplet/cluster, the backup is pretty safely stored at DO.
Weekly Backups
1. At Digital Ocean, select Backups & Snapshots.
2. Select the Backups tab. Select Setup Automated Backups.
3. At Enable Automated Backups:
A. Select your droplet. 💡It probably starts with “hcce-”.
B. Select either Weekly Backups or Daily Backups.
C. For Backup Window, Select your preferred Day of the Week, and select your preferred Time of day. You can leave this on the defaults or change it to when it works for you.
D. Select Enable Backups.
Notification box, “Backups enabled on hcce-cluster…..”
4. When the backup is made, it will be listed underneath Automated Backups. Note: in our testing, it took ~5 minutes to save a backup, maybe faster. But it was immediate. We can’t guarantee that for you because we were purposely trying to get a backup. YMMV.
Restoring your Hubs data from a Backup
1. To restore, from the Backups tab, your droplet, select 1 backup from the 1 you have done. In the future, if you picked Weekly, you’ll have 4 backups to choose from. If you picked Daily, you’ll have 7 to choose from. Select Restore Droplet.
Notification box: Are you sure that you want to restore [your droplet] with [your saved image]? Note: restoring will replace the current Droplet with an older image. Select Restore Droplet.
We found it took 5-10 minutes for the droplet to appear again. Easy peasy.
Snapshots
A snapshot is a one-time memory save that you can manually do anytime. The process is very similar to Backups.
1. At Digital Ocean, select Backups & Snapshots.
2. Select the Snapshots tab. Select your droplet, enter a snapshot file name. Select Take Snapshot.
🤔 Advice: we saved it with the current date (i.e. 2024-11-06-documentation-day).
Notification that saving is in progress.
Notification that saving is done: Snapshot created. On the Droplets tab, your saved snapshot will appear. At Droplets: the snapshot name, the file size, which region it was saved to (by default it is saved to the same region where you chose to have your original droplet/cluster with DO), when it was created, and a More dropdown menu.
Restoring your Hubs data from a Snapshot
1. To restore, from the Snapshots tab, Droplets tab, select More dropdown menu. Select Restore Droplet.
Notification box: Are you sure that you want to restore [your old droplet] from [your saved snapshot]? Note: restoring will replace the current Droplet with an older image.
2. Select Restore Droplet.
Notification that Restoring is in progress.
All done! Notification: Droplet Restored from Snapshot.
After Restoring
It will take a short while for everything to be restored. DO might indicate that the droplet is available and running but it takes a few minutes for Hubs to restart itself. If you try your Hubs immediately, you will get broken webpages.
FAQs for Backups
What about SnapShooter?
SnapShooter is a service offered by DO that will take care of all backups for you. As one Community Member put it, it lets your money do the work for you. In our testing, the cheapest workable option for Hubs instances would be $66/month. If you like setting things once and then forgetting about it, this service would work.
However, the process to setup and restore from either Backups or Snapshots is not hard to do, comparatively.