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How to Manage Snapshots for Vultr Instances

Updated on November 27, 2024

Snapshots for Vultr instances are point-in-time images of your entire Cloud Compute instances hard drives. You can use snapshots to create backups or to replicate Cloud Compute instances. Unlike Automatic Backups for Vultr instances, you must take snapshots manually.

Follow this guide to manage Snapshots for Vultr instances using the Vultr Customer Portal, API, and CLI.

  • Vultr Customer Portal
  • Vultr API
  • Vultr CLI

  1. Navigate to Products and select Compute.

  2. Select your target Cloud Compute instance from the list.

    Cloud Compute List

  3. Navigate to Snapshots, enter a label and click Take Snapshot.

    Take Snapshot

  1. Send a GET request to the List Instances endpoint to get the Cloud Compute instance 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 specifying a cloud compute instance ID to create a snapshot.

    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" : "Weekly-Snapshot-14-08-2024"
        }'

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

  3. Send a GET request to the List Snapshots endpoint to view all snapshots.

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

  1. List all cloud compute instances and note the instance ID.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli instance list

  2. Create a snapshot by specifying the Cloud Compute instance ID and the snapshot description.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli snapshot create --id instance_id --description "Weekly Snapshot 14-08-2024"

  3. List all snapshots.

    console 
    $ vultr-cli snapshot list

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