I have recently put in some hours for organising my two existing droplets – actually combining them into a single one. After a lot of cleanup, backing up and moving stuff – when everything seemed done and they were ready to be deleted, I still had a sour taste at the thought that I will delete something I used for almost three years.
Therefore, I decided to investigate on how I can download the information from digitalocean. Apparently, they don’t (yet) provide a way to safely do that, so some special commands are in order.
Mysql
The main database I have used was a MariaDB server. To backup everything I have used the command:
mysqldump -uroot -p<your password> --all-databases > /var/all_databases.sql
Everything
To create a backup of everything else, in the terminal on my machine I have used:
ssh root@<your droplet's ip address> "dd if=/dev/vda1 | gzip -1 -" | dd of=image.gz
Be aware that this command will take quite a long time to complete and that there is no progress indicator.
After this command, you will be prompted for your password. Also, add -p<your ssh port> if you have changed your default ssh port (which is highly recommended, by the way)
Sources
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/download-snapshots-from-digitalocean-leonid-burceacov
- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/132797/how-to-dd-a-remote-disk-using-ssh-on-local-machine-and-save-to-a-local-disk
- https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-back-up-mysql-databases-from-the-command-line-with-linux/
- https://blog.sleeplessbeastie.eu/2012/04/29/virtualbox-convert-raw-image-to-vdi-and-otherwise/