For Cityhost customers who rent virtual servers, a new free service — snapshots — has been introduced. They allow you to take a snapshot of the state of the server system in order to "roll back" it, if necessary, to the moment when the snapshot is launched.
This is one of the types of backup, designed to reproduce the state of the entire server system from a certain point in the past. When using this technology, not the data itself is saved, but all the operations performed with it. This helps protect against global updates on the server, which include:
- Making changes to the operating system
- Installation and testing of new software
- Updating data in databases and catalogs
- Deploy (downloading a new version of the site to the server)
- CMS update
The new feature allows you to manually launch one snapshot with a capacity of up to 10 GB on the server. The lifetime of the copy is 24 hours, after which the snapshot is automatically deleted.
Starting, restoring, and forcefully deleting snapshots is done in the client's control panel. The instructions describe in detail all the processes of setting up the service.
But you should not rely only on the snapshot, because it is not a complete copy. In parallel with it, another information storage mechanism is used — backup, which duplicates all data existing on the server and stores it on a third-party medium.
