A snapshot captures the exact state of your VPS’s disk at a single point in time, letting you roll back instantly if a risky change — a major OS upgrade, an untested config change, a software install — goes wrong.
Taking a snapshot
- In Virtualizor, open Manage VPS and select the VM.
- Find the Snapshot section (sometimes under a dedicated tab).
- Click Create Snapshot, optionally naming it something identifiable (“before-php-upgrade”) rather than relying on the timestamp alone.
Taking a snapshot is typically fast, though it may briefly pause disk I/O on the VM depending on the underlying storage technology — doing it during low-traffic hours is a reasonable precaution.
Restoring from a snapshot
From the same Snapshot section, select the snapshot you want and choose Restore. This reverts the entire disk to exactly the state it was in when the snapshot was taken — including undoing any changes made after that point, so anything created or modified since (new files, database changes, new emails if mail runs on the same VM) will be lost along with the problem you’re rolling back.
Snapshots are not backups
This is the most important caveat: a snapshot usually lives on the SAME physical storage as the VM itself. If that storage fails entirely, the snapshot is lost along with the live data — it protects against a bad software change, not against hardware failure. Keep a separate, genuinely offsite backup (see our VPS backup practices) for actual disaster recovery.
Good habits
- Take a snapshot immediately before any major, hard-to-reverse change.
- Don’t keep snapshots indefinitely — they consume storage, and an old snapshot restored by mistake can undo weeks of legitimate changes.
- Confirm the snapshot succeeded before proceeding with the risky change it’s meant to protect against.