VPS Snaps

What is VPS Snaps?

VPS Snaps is an automated backup service for virtual private servers. It handles provider snapshots, database dumps, Docker volumes, file archives, and Kubernetes manifests on a schedule you define — and writes every archive into an S3 bucket you own rather than into storage controlled by the service itself.

The core idea is straightforward: set a job once, and VPS Snaps keeps running it. A dashboard shows backup health at a glance, with counts for servers, jobs, storage destinations, and failed runs over the last 24 hours, plus a live feed of recent backup activity.

Who it's for

• Solo developers and small teams running one or a handful of VPS instances who want backups without building their own cron-and-rsync pipeline.
• Agencies managing client infrastructure that need per-server snapshot, database, and file jobs with retention handled automatically.
• Ops engineers on containerized stacks who want Docker volumes, compose files, and Kubernetes manifests captured alongside the underlying server images.

Key features

Provider snapshots that stay in your account

A snapshot job calls your provider's own API — a DigitalOcean snapshot, Hetzner image, EC2 AMI, or GCE Machine Image — so the image is created inside your account and remains restorable from the provider's console regardless of what happens to VPS Snaps. DigitalOcean, Linode, and Google Cloud connect over OAuth, while Hetzner and Vultr take an API token and AWS uses a scoped IAM key.

Scheduled database dumps

Point a job at any SSH-reachable host and VPS Snaps runs the dump tool already installed there, covering PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB with no extension or daemon required. Output is gzipped on the server and relayed straight into your bucket as it is produced, hashed along the way so each run records a checksum of exactly what landed.

File backups over SSH

Give a job a list of paths and exclude patterns, and VPS Snaps runs tar on the server and pipes the archive directly into your bucket. A path that no longer exists is logged as a warning and skipped rather than failing the entire run.

Flexible scheduling with retention

Jobs run hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or on a fixed interval in minutes, anchored to your timezone so a 02:00 job stays at 02:00 across a DST change. Retention prunes old images after each successful run.

What stands out

Every archive lands in a bucket you own — the backup never depends on VPS Snaps staying in business.

That ownership model runs through the whole product. Provider snapshots live inside your cloud account, file and database archives go to your own S3 storage, and credentials are sealed with AES-256-GCM before they reach the service's database. It is a meaningfully different posture from backup tools that hold your data hostage in their own infrastructure.

Worth checking out if…

You already run servers on a supported provider and want automated snapshots, database dumps, and file archives without maintaining the plumbing yourself. It is also worth a look if data ownership matters to you — every artifact ends up somewhere you control. Just note that database backups require the Standard plan or higher, and a Linode job captures a single disk, so a second data disk needs its own job or a file backup alongside it.