DdevSep 21, 2026 ~1 min source read

DDEV Blog: DDEV Snapshots: Checkpoints, Restores, and Seeded Databases

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Snapshots have been a beloved feature of DDEV for years, but in v1.25.4 there is so much more.

A DDEV snapshot is a physical, "hot" backup of your database — mariadb-backup / xtrabackup for MariaDB and MySQL, or pg_basebackup for Postgres — not a text-based mysqldump.

Because it copies the database's on-disk files instead of dumping SQL statements, it's much faster to create and restore, especially on large databases.

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The useful part

Snapshots have been a beloved feature of DDEV for years, but in v1.25.4 there is so much more. A DDEV snapshot is a physical, "hot" backup of your database — mariadb-backup / xtrabackup for MariaDB and MySQL, or pg_basebackup for Postgres — not a text-based mysqldump. Because it copies the database's on-disk files instead of dumping SQL statements, it's much faster to create and restore, especially on large databases.

How it works

Normally snapshots live in.ddev/db_snapshots/, and the filename encodes the database type and version, for example mariadb_11.8.
That's why a snapshot only restores against a matching engine and version — restoring a mariadb_11.8 snapshot into a mariadb_10.11 project will fail.

Details worth keeping

All the basics about snapshots are in the docs. Snapshots are compressed with zstd by default. --uncompressed skips the decompression step on restore, trading a...

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