One of the first things I relentlessly pursued after deciding to leave cPanel was backups. I’m the kind of person that wants backups for the backups’ backups.

I found SnapShooter.io after doing a quick search. I chatted with Founder Simon Bennett and gave the service a try.

So, lets back up a second. DigitalOcean will take weekly backups, also known as snapshots, of your droplet. The backup is stored separately from your droplet, but in the same datacenter. You can quickly restore your droplet to a prior state with a few simple clicks.

What does SnapShooter.io do?

It automates the backup process so you can take more automated snapshots than what DigitalOcean currently offers. I’m currently using their free plan and each day my droplet is backed up while retaining only the last 7 snapshots.

Is this really necessary?

Maybe not, but if you have clients that are paying you for a premium service, I’d highly recommend it.

Going even further…

While backing up with daily snapshots is great, what if the unthinkable happens and DigitalOcean loses everything, including your backed up snapshots.

This is where having a second layer of protection comes into play. I favor All-in-One WP Migration. I use their FTP extension to send weekly backups to an offsite provider.

Since All-in-One WP Migration only creates full backups (which can be slow for larger sites), I recommend a third-party service like BlogVault for incremental backups. This is all assuming that you want to manage things without using command line.