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How to Create Snapshots on a Vultr Cloud Compute Instance

Updated on 11 September, 2025

Learn how to create and manage point-in-time backups of your Vultr Cloud Compute instance for data protection and recovery.

A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of an instance's state, including its entire file system and disk contents. Snapshots offer a quick backup solution for instances, making it easier to restore data in case of unexpected failures or data loss.

Follow this guide to create snapshots on a Vultr Cloud Compute instance using the Vultr Customer Portal, API, or CLI.

  • Vultr Customer Portal
  • Vultr API
  • Vultr CLI
  1. Navigate to Products and click Compute.
  2. Click the target Vultr Cloud Compute instance to open its management page.
  3. Navigate to the Snapshots tab.
  4. Enter a new descriptive label in the Label field and click Create Snapshot to take a new snapshot of your instance. Snapshot creation can take upto 30 minutes depending on the instance size.

  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 POST request to the Create Snapshot endpoint to create a new snapshot of the instance.

    console 
    $ curl "https://api.vultr.com/v2/snapshots" \
  -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${VULTR_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  --data '{
    "instance_id" : "<instance-id>",
    "description" : "<label>"
  }'

  1. List all available instances and note your target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli instance list

  2. Create a new snapshot of the instance.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli snapshot create --id <instance-id>

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