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How to Delete Snapshots

Updated on 29 September, 2025

Permanently removes the selected resource from your Vultr account.

Deleting snapshots completely removes the resource from your account. You should only do this operation after restoring a snapshot to a Vultr Cloud Compute instance or after provisioning a Vultr Cloud Compute instance using the snapshot image. After deleting a snapshot, you can't undo the operation, so you should take great care.

Follow this guide to delete snapshots using the Vultr Customer Portal, API, CLI, or Terraform.

  • Vultr Customer Portal
  • Vultr API
  • Vultr CLI
  • Terraform
  1. Navigate to Products and select Orchestration.
  2. Click Snapshots. Select the target snapshot from the list and click the delete icon to remove the snapshot.
  3. Click Remove Snapshot to confirm.

  1. Send a GET request to the List Snapshots endpoint to list all snapshots.

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

  2. Send a DELETE request to the Delete Snapshot endpoint specifying a snapshot ID to delete a snapshot.

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

    Visit the Delete Snapshot endpoint to view additional attributes to add to your request.

  1. List all snapshots and note the target snapshot's ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli snapshot list

  2. Delete a snapshot by specifying a snapshot ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli snapshot delete snapshot_id

    Run vultr-cli snapshot delete --help to view all options.

  1. Open your Terraform configuration where the snapshot resource was created.

  2. Remove the vultr_snapshot resource block, or destroy it by target.

    terraform 
    resource "vultr_snapshot" "weekly" {
    instance_id = var.instance_id
    description = "Weekly-Snapshot-14-08-2024"
}

# To delete, either remove this block from configuration
# or run: terraform destroy -target vultr_snapshot.weekly

  3. Apply the configuration and observe the following output:

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

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