When running applications such as WordPress on Google Cloud, it’s important to have regular backups of your website – this way, you can quickly restore your website in case of an emergency.

If your website ever goes down on Google Cloud, it’s possible to completely restore it in just a matter of seconds!

In this tutorial, you will learn step-by-step how to backup and restore websites hosted on Google Cloud.

Before getting started with this tutorial, you should have already deployed a website on Google Cloud, and reserved a static IP address for your instance.

Backup a Website

1. Create a Disk Snapshot

In this section of the tutorial, you will create a snapshot of the persistent disk that contains your website. Snapshots are used to capture the state of persistent disks at a given point in time, allowing you to restore your virtual machine instances in cases of failure.

Restore a Website

1. Create Instance from Disk Snapshot

In this section of the tutorial, you will learn how to restore your website from a snapshot.

In order to restore your website from a snapshot, the snapshot needs to have been created when the website was operating correctly. In other words, you can’t take a snapshot of a broken website, restore it, and expect it to work correctly.

2. Assign IP Address to New Instance

In this section of the tutorial, you will configure your website’s network settings to redirect traffic to the new instance.

That’s it!

Now that you know how to safely backup and restore websites on Google Cloud, you may be interested in automating your backups!

For improved reliability, you should take these preliminary steps before creating snapshots.

Please leave your questions and comments below!

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