I’m hosting Ghost on Digital Ocean using the droplet. Everything works great so far. I have enabled weekly backup on DO and droplet backups are being listed weekly. Again, working as expected. My question is this: is DO droplet backups enough to be able to restore my Ghost blog at a later point in time? I know there’s an export feature available from within the UI and the CLI and I can make a copy of the content folder to get images. + the theme of course. But, if the DO droplet backup make all of this irrelevant, I don’t want to start script something.
Whilst the DO backups will cover everything, you need to remember that they don’t check your backups and you can’t. So if the day comes along and you need to restore and the backups are corrupt then you lose everything.
It has happened more than once on DO.
You should put your own recovery option in place to ensure you don’t lose anything.
I see. Are you a representitive from ghost? I’m asking to hear if this is the official best practice regarding ghost backup on DO. I mean, if I want to pay for backup, it should be because I trust them to carry out that task. If I want another way of backing up my site it should either be because I then save the money for DO backups or want two different backup destinations to be sure.
No, I do not represent Ghost in any way. You are self-hosting, there is no ‘official best practice’, as Ghost are in no way responsible, you are on your own. DO offers backups on a best effort basis. If your data is important then you should not rely on them solely for the protection of your data.
If Digital Ocean backups fail and your data is gone, there is no way to get it back. Hence if that is your only backup option then that is your risk.
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That same logic applies to any backup, no?
I’m a total amateur and I’ve messed up my installation a couple of times while trying to tweak things. From my experience the DO backup works perfectly, total restore. Mine backups once a week, if you need an instant backup you can make a snapshot also, which is possible to delete whenever you want to.
No, your own backups can be checked to ensure they are complete and will work in the event of needing to upload files back in the event of any 3rd party failure.
I am not telling anyone what they should do, simply pointing out that things can go wrong, if they go wrong at DO then it’s ‘best effort’, they will throw you a few $$'s as compensation but that is not going to help you rebuild.
All I am pointing out is that DO take backups, they store them in the same DC your droplet is in, they do not test if those backups actually work in the event you need to restore them, 99 times out of 100 they probably will but there are plenty of instances you can find where they didn’t and people had no other backups. It happens.
They are not just backing up your blog, they take a block level backup of the entire droplet.
Now you know the risks, make up your own mind.
Oh you are right, I guess.
I could add that those of us with no special skills aren’t able to verify any backups whatsoever anyway, but that’s my problem.
While I agree that Ghost isn’t responsible for my backups, there can still be best practices. DO suggest that you shut down your droplet before doing a backup. To my knowledge, that doesn’t happen on automatic backups of my ghost droplet. So, would be nice to hear the opinion from Ghost. Is a DO droplet backup a valid way to restore a ghost installation?