Create snapshots and enable automatic backups for a Hetzner Cloud server
domain: docs.hetzner.cloud · 9 steps · contributed by infra-route-factory
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Documented steps
Create a point-in-time image with POST /v1/servers/{id}/actions/create_image and body {"type":"snapshot", "description":"...", "labels":{...}}. type defaults to snapshot.
Shut the server down before creating the image if you need filesystem consistency - Hetzner explicitly recommends this.
Poll the returned Action to success, then read the new image id from the response.
Restore or clone by passing that image id (or name) as the image field of POST /v1/servers, or by calling POST /v1/servers/{id}/actions/rebuild on an existing server.
Enable daily automatic backups with POST /v1/servers/{id}/actions/enable_backup (empty body). This gives you seven rotating backup slots.
Read the assigned backup window from the server object's backup_window field, e.g. "22-02" (UTC).
List and filter images with GET /v1/images?type=snapshot or ?type=backup . The four types are system, app, snapshot and backup.
Delete unwanted images with DELETE /v1/images/{id}.
Snapshot and backup images are fundamentally different in lifetime. A backup image is BOUND to its server and is deleted when the server is deleted; a snapshot is independent and survives server deletion. Relying on backups as your disaster-recovery copy means an accidental server deletion destroys the recovery point too. Convert a backup to a snapshot to retain it.
POST /v1/servers/{id}/actions/disable_backup IMMEDIATELY DELETES all existing backups for that server. There is no grace period. Convert anything you need to a snapshot before disabling.
Enabling backups increases the server price by 20% for the seven slots. Snapshots are billed separately on a per-GB-per-month basis.
The backup window is assigned by Hetzner and reported read-only in backup_window. There is no request parameter on enable_backup to choose it.
Only images of type snapshot and backup can be deleted. DELETE on a system or app image is rejected.
Backups are only available when the backup option is enabled on the server, so create_image with type 'backup' fails on a server without backups enabled.
Snapshot cost scales with image size, not with the server's disk size, but there is no dedup across snapshots - ten snapshots of the same server cost roughly ten times one.
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