Backup Google Cloud VM Automatically with Snapshot Schedules. A backup is mandatory for every website to ensure reliability. In Google Cloud, you can create a schedule to take a backup of your disk automatically in terms of snapshots daily or weekly or hourly.
This guide, shows you how to create and setup snapshot schedules for your Compute Engine Instance.
Prerequisites
- A running Compute Engine, see the Setting up Compute Engine Instance with Ubuntu 18.04.
Create a Snapshot Schedule
Once you have your Compute Engine running, you can create a snapshot schedule. To setup auto backups, go to your Google Cloud Dashboard and navigate to Compute Engine >> Snapshots.
Click Create a snapshot schedule.

Here you can specify all details for your schedule. Once a schedule is created you cannot edit the schedule to change the details. So, you need to delete the old one and create a new schedule.
In Name, enter a schedule name
In Region, select the region where you want this schedule to be available.
In Snapshot Location, Multi-regional
Regional
You can leave the source disk location to default. If you choose different location there may be a network transfer fee to store this snapshot in a location different than the source disk.
In Schedule frequency you can select Hourly
or Daily
or Weekly and select the time to start the backup.
In Autodelete snapshots after, you can enter the days to delete the created snapshots which are older than these days.
In Deletion rule, choose what happens after you delete the disk that uses this schedule.
You can Enable VSS if you want to use this schedule with an instance running Windows.
Click Create.
Attaching a snapshot schedule to a disk
Once you have created a snapshot schedule you need to attach the disk with the schedule.
- Navigate to Compute Engine >> Disks
- Select the disk you want to add the schedule
to . - At the top of the page, click Edit.
- In
Snapshot schedule select the schedule you just created. - Click Save to complete the task.

Now, you have created a snapshot schedule and attached a disk to the schedule.
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Conclusion
Now you have learned how to set up Automattic Backups using Snapshot Schedules on Google Cloud Platform.
If you have anything to discuss please post your comment below. Thank you!
Hi,
Thank you for the guide!
The scheduled snapshots that are created is one big ( about 2gb) and then the next once are smaller (like 100mb), presumably just saving the changes.
How do you go about create a new instance from these snapshots? Looks like you can only attach one snapshot to a disk.