Digital Ocean How to download a copy or snapshot of your droplet or vm locally and run it on your own server

* This post uses the DD command which if used improperly WILL completely destroy your system.  If you are unsure about what you are doing do not even attempt anything below. The command below will overwrite any drive you tell it to, with no regard or warning. Make absolutely sure you know the drive letters wyouo want to write over. you have been warned! The command below has purposely been written that if you copy and paste it will return an error. if you can not easily figure out the correct syntax you probably should not be using it. -Carmine

I’ve scoured the internet for days and found bits and pieces on how to do this, however no clear cut instructions.

I am running a Citrix Xenserver datacenter and this worked like a charm for me.

Create a machine on your local Xenserver of the same type you have running on Digital Ocean. For instance I had WordPress running on a Ubuntu droplet. I created an Ubuntu Vm on Xenserver of the same version running on DO. Then create a second disk and attach it to the vm you just created. So now i have a Ubuntu vm (with xenserver tools installed) and two vdisks, xvda and xvdb.

Next log into your Digital Ocean droplet and make sure you can log into it as root using a password. next type:

 

dd if=/dev/vda | ssh root@yourxenservervmipaddress ‘dd of=/dev/xvdb’

you should see text to the effect that the key has not been cached…  type “yes”

next type your vm’s root password.

now.. wait… wait…. wait

it will take a while depending how large your vm is (Make sure the disk you created for /dec/xvdb is the same geometry as the Digital Ocean droplet)

when the prompt returns, as long as you dont see an error you have created your virtual machine!

shutdown both the droplet and the xenserver vm.

detach the second disk (/dev/xvdb) from the xenserver vm you created.

create a new xenserver vm with the same specs as your Digital ocean droplet and attach the disk from the previous step as /dev/xvda to it.

Boot the vm!

I was able to install xenserver tools and had a perfectly working WordPress installation.

 

NOTE: change your networking..

nano /etc/network/interfaces

and delete or “#” out the line that sources /etc/network/interfaces.d

then setup /etc/network/interfaces as you would normally for your local network.

Hope this helps!

for centos it would be a little different but you get the idea.. (have not tried it yet)