Cloudfanatic offers two ways to copy servers and prevent data loss: to create backups and to create snapshots. Although backups and snapshots serve more or less the same purpose, they have differences:
Snapshots:
Snapshot is a quick (almost instant) and easy way to create and restore a copy of your server with just a single click. They are stored on the same storage as your server, thus they should not be used as backups, as if there is a catastrophic failure of the storage you will lose both your server and your snapshots.
The total amount of change that one snapshot can hold is 1GB. If you are making changes inside your server that exceed 1GB is size, the snapshot will become invalid. In this case you need to perform a backup rather than a snapshot.
WARNING: Snapshots will become unusable or disappear from your panel if you:
- Reinstall your server
- Restore server from backup
- Upgrade your server
- Exceed 1GB in data changed on your disk
Backups:
Backups create a copy of your server, just like snapshots, but the backup is kept on a separate storage. As such backups can take a long time to create and to restore depending on the size of your drive.
Backups are not affected by anything and are always available for restoration regardless of the actions you perform within your server.
