A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of your entire server, disk and all. Take one before anything risky, restore one when something goes wrong.
What a snapshot actually captures
A full snapshot includes the entire disk exactly as it was at that moment, every file, every installed package, every configuration change. Restoring puts the server back to that exact state, anything created or changed after the snapshot was taken is gone once you restore.
Taking a snapshot
From the service page in the dashboard, open the Snapshots panel and create one, it runs against the live server without requiring a reboot in most cases. Name it something you will recognize later, "before-migration" is more useful three weeks from now than "snapshot 4".
When to take one
- Before a major version upgrade, of the OS, a database engine, or any core service.
- Before running an unfamiliar install script from a source you have not fully audited.
- Before a configuration change you are not fully confident about, firewall rules, a web server config rewrite, a database migration.
Restoring
From the same Snapshots panel, pick the snapshot and confirm the restore. The server will be briefly unavailable while the disk is rolled back, and comes back up automatically once it finishes, no manual reboot required.
A snapshot is insurance, not a backup strategy on its own, it lives on the same underlying storage as the server. For anything you cannot afford to lose, also keep an off-server copy.
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