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How to Enable Automatic Backups on a Vultr Cloud Compute Instance

Updated on 11 September, 2025

A service that automatically creates and stores backups of your Vultr instances on a regular schedule.

Automatic Backups allow you to create full backups of your instance's data and file system on a scheduled basis, ensuring recovery in case of unexpected failures. These backups follow specific schedules and retention policies to ensure your instance is securely backed up in your Vultr account

Follow this guide to enable automatic backups on a Vultr Cloud Compute instance using the Vultr Customer Portal, API, or Terraform.

  • Vultr Customer Portal
  • Vultr API
  • Terraform
  1. Navigate to Products and click Compute
  2. Click your target Vultr Cloud Compute instance to open its management page.
  3. Navigate to the Backups tab.
  4. Click Enable Backups to turn on automatic backups.
  5. Click Enable Backups in the confirmation prompt to enable automatic backups.
  6. Click the Schedule Backups drop-down to choose a backup schedule.
  7. click Update to create automatic backups based on your selection.

  1. Send a GET request to the List Instances endpoint and note your target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/instances" \
  -X GET \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}"

  2. Send a PATCH request to the Update Instance endpoint to update the instance and enable automatic backups.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/instances/{instance-id}" \
  -X PATCH \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "backups" : "enabled"
  }'

  3. Send a POST request to the Set Instance Backup Schedule endpoint to create a new automatic backups schedule.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/instances/{instance-id}/backup-schedule" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "type": "daily",
    "hour": 10,
    "dow": 1,
    "dom": 1
  }'

    Visit the Set Instance Backup Schedule API page to view additional backup schedule attributes.

  1. Open your Terraform configuration for the existing Cloud Compute instance.

  2. Enable backups and define a schedule in the configuration.

    terraform 
    resource "vultr_instance" "cc" {
    label       = "cc-instance-1"
    hostname    = "cc-instance-1"
    region      = "del"
    plan        = "vc2-2c-4gb"   # or vhf-*, vhp-* etc. per need
    os_id       = 2284

    backups = "enabled"

    backups_schedule {
        type = "daily"  # daily | weekly | monthly
        hour = 10       # UTC hour (0-23)
        # dow/dom only when type = "weekly" or "monthly"
        # dow = 1
        # dom = 1
    }
}

  3. Apply the configuration and observe the following output:

    Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 1 changed, 0 destroyed.

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