Snapshots & Backups
Protect your instances with point-in-time snapshots and full off-instance backups. Roll back in seconds, schedule automated saves, and restore to any prior state — without ever taking your workload offline.
Explore Snapshots →What are Snapshots & Backups?
LXD gives you two complementary safety nets. A snapshot is an instant, storage-level copy of your instance's disk and optionally its runtime state — stored on the same host, ready for a sub-second rollback. A backup is a portable, self-contained archive exported off the instance (and optionally off the host) for disaster recovery, migration, or long-term retention. Together they cover everything from a bad config change to a full host failure.
Instant Snapshots
Snapshots are copy-on-write checkpoints taken at the storage layer. They capture the full disk state of your instance in under a second — even while it is running. No pause, no reboot required. Create one before every risky change and roll back instantly if anything goes wrong.
Stateful Snapshots
Go beyond disk state — capture the full in-memory runtime of a running container or VM using CRIU. Restore the snapshot and the instance resumes exactly where it left off, including open connections and running processes. Ideal for long-running jobs you cannot afford to restart.
Scheduled Snapshots
Set a cron-style schedule on any instance and LXD will snapshot it automatically. Combine with a retention limit so old snapshots are pruned without manual housekeeping — set it once and forget it.
Portable Backups
Export any instance — or a specific snapshot of it — as a compressed
.tar.gz archive. The backup includes the full filesystem,
config, and metadata needed to restore it on any LXD host.
Ship it to object storage, another region, or a cold archive.
One-command Restore
Restore a snapshot to the same instance or use it to clone a new one. Import a backup archive to spin up an identical instance on any host — perfect for staging-to-production promotions and disaster recovery drills.
Why use Snapshots & Backups?
From a risky package upgrade to a full datacenter evacuation — snapshots and backups have you covered at every scale.
Safe deployments
Snapshot before every deployment. If the update breaks something, roll back to the pre-deploy state in under a second — no need to rebuild from scratch or dig through logs.
Automated nightly saves
Schedule daily snapshots with a 7-day retention window. Your instances are protected around the clock without any manual intervention or cron scripts to maintain.
Instance cloning & promotion
Snapshot a staging instance and restore it as a new production container. You get a pixel-perfect copy of the environment — no config drift, no missing packages.
Disaster recovery & migration
Export a backup archive and import it on any LXD host — on-premises, a different Orbit Nova node, or another cloud entirely. Full recovery from a total host failure in minutes.
Snapshot & backup commands.
Everything you need to snapshot, restore, export and schedule from the OrbitNova CLI.
Snapshot in seconds.
From a one-off safety checkpoint to a fully automated nightly backup schedule — all with a single CLI command. No agents, no plugins, no extra config.