Volume backups

Volume backups are the off-site counterpart to snapshot protection. While snapshots live in the same storage cluster as your volume, backups are shipped incrementally to Hetzner Storage Boxes — separate hardware from the servers holding your live volume — so they survive even the loss of the whole cluster.

Pricing

€0.15 per backed-up GB per month excl. VAT, prorated, based on the source volume's size. Like snapshot protection, the charge follows the source volume: backing up a 10 GB volume costs €1.50/month (excl. VAT) regardless of how many backup copies are retained.

The control panel shows the exact monthly cost before you enable backups. If enabling the charge fails (for example a declined card), nothing is provisioned.

How it works

• Enable backups per volume from Volumes → Backups in the control panel, or through the API for volumes in child namespaces.
• A backup is taken nightly, plus one optional manual backup on demand ("Back up now").
• Retention is configurable from 1 to 30 days (that many successful nightly backups are kept). Older backups are pruned automatically.
• Backups are incremental: after the first full copy, only changed blocks are uploaded.

Restoring

Restores always create a new volume — the original volume and its data are never modified or overwritten. Pick a ready backup, give the new volume a name, and it is carved from your pre-paid storage pool like any other volume (the pool must have enough unused GB; restores use the backup's original size).

Once the restored volume is bound, attach it to a container as usual.

Billing lifecycle

• Past due or suspended accounts keep their existing backups (and continue to be charged for them), but no new backups are taken and no pruning happens until the account is active again.
• Closing an account deletes all of its backups from backup storage as part of teardown.
• Disabling backups for a volume stops new backups and deletes all retained backups for it; the charge stops once deletion completes.

Limitations

• Backups restore at the source volume's original size — restores cannot resize.
• In-place restore (overwriting the existing volume) is not supported by design; restores always create a new volume.
• Backup data is stored on DollarBox-operated Hetzner Storage Boxes in the same region.
• Backups are not encrypted at rest, and neither are the volumes they are taken from. DollarBox does not encrypt either. Access to the backup store is restricted to the platform's backup infrastructure, and that is the whole of the protection. Encrypt in your application if your data needs encryption at rest.
• The first backup of a large volume can take a while; its status stays creating until the upload completes.