Snapshots

A snapshot records your server’s disk as it is at one moment, so you can return to that moment later. It’s the right thing to take before an upgrade, a configuration change you’re unsure about, or an OS install.

Take one

Go to Servers and open the server.
Open the Snapshots tab.
Create a snapshot and give it a name that will still mean something next week — “before php 8.3 upgrade” beats “snap1”.

You don’t have to power the server off. Read the next section for why powering off is still the safer option for anything holding data.

Running vs powered-off snapshots

Powered off gives you a clean disk image, always safe to restore.

Running depends on whether the guest agent is installed:

With the agent, the platform asks your server to pause writes and flush them to disk for the instant the snapshot is taken. The result is internally consistent.
Without the agent, the snapshot is crash-consistent — the equivalent of pulling the power cable at that moment. A filesystem will normally replay its journal and recover, but a database mid-transaction may need repair on restore.

If the server runs a database and you don’t have the agent, either install it or stop the database briefly while you snapshot.

Restore one

Restoring discards everything written since the snapshot was taken. That’s the point of it, but it means anything created in between — new data, new mail, new orders — is gone.

Open the Snapshots tab.
Choose the snapshot and restore it.
Confirm.

If you might want the current state back too, take a snapshot before restoring an older one.

Housekeeping

Snapshots take up space, and they grow as the server diverges from the moment they capture — a snapshot of a busy server gets more expensive the longer you keep it.

Delete the ones that have done their job. If you took one before an upgrade and the upgrade went fine, that snapshot has no further use.