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How to Enable Automatic Backups on a Vultr Cloud GPU Instance

Updated on 11 September, 2025

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

Automatic Backups enable the creation of a full backup of your instance data and file system using a specific schedule for recovery in case of unexpected failures. Automatic backups use specific backup schedule intervals and retention policies to ensure your instance is backed up in your Vultr account.

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

  • Vultr Customer Portal
  • Vultr API
  • Vultr CLI
  • Terraform
  1. Navigate to Products and click Compute.
  2. Click your target 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 select a back up schedule.
  7. Click Update to create automatic backups based on set the schedule.

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

    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 to enable on your instance.

    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 schedule attributes to create automatic backups.

  1. List all instances in your Vultr account and note the target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli instance list

  2. Create a new automatic backups schedule using the target instance's ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli instance backup create e56d93ea-41c4-4dbe-93e2-537c552cf2fb --type daily --hour 10 --dow 1 --dom 1

    Run vultr-cli instance backup create --help to view more additional schedule options to create automatic backups.

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

  2. Update the backups value in the instance resource to "enabled".

    terraform 
    resource "vultr_instance" "gpu" {
    # ...existing fields (region, plan, label, etc.)

    backups = "enabled"  # Enable automatic backups
}

  3. Apply the configuration and observe the following output:

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

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