DigitalOcean Spaces: Regions, Cross-Region Replication, and Backup
· 4 min read · Updated
People often assume DigitalOcean Spaces replicates across regions the way Amazon S3 can, and treat a single Space as a backup. It doesn't. A Space lives in one region, and DigitalOcean does not copy it to another region for you.
Pick the region closest to your users when you create a Space. If you want a second copy in another region or with another provider, you have to make it yourself.
Each Space belongs to one datacenter region, chosen when you create it and fixed after that. These are the current Spaces regions:
| Region code | Location |
|---|---|
| NYC3 | New York City, United States |
| SFO3 | San Francisco, United States |
| AMS3 | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| FRA1 | Frankfurt, Germany |
| SGP1 | Singapore |
| SYD1 | Sydney, Australia |
| BLR1 | Bangalore, India |
DigitalOcean adds regions over time, so check its documentation for the current list. Choose the region nearest the people who read the data most, because a Space serves only from its own region's endpoint.
No. Spaces has no built-in cross-region replication. No setting mirrors a Space in NYC3 to a Space in FRA1, and nothing fails over to another region automatically.
That is the main difference from Amazon S3, which has Cross-Region Replication (CRR) as a bucket feature. On Spaces, if you want the same objects in two regions, you copy them there yourself and copy again when things change.
This has a few consequences:
- A region outage hits your Space directly. With no replica, there is no other region to fail over to.
- If you need the data in a second geography for compliance or latency, you create a second Space there and fill it yourself.
- Spaces has no "backup to another region" button, so any backup is one you set up.
Spaces includes a built-in CDN that caches your objects at edge locations for faster delivery. It is easy to mistake for replication. The CDN keeps those copies for performance and can expire them at any time, while the authoritative copy still lives in one region. If that object is lost, the cache will not bring it back.
Blober can make the second copy from your desktop, without scripts or AWS CLI loops:
- Spaces to another Spaces region. Connect your DigitalOcean account in Blober. It shows every Space across all regions in one view, so you can copy objects from a Space in one region into a Space you create in another.
- Spaces to another provider. The same flow copies a Space to AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, Cloudflare R2, Azure Blob, Google Drive, Dropbox, or local and NAS storage, for an offsite backup that does not depend on DigitalOcean at all.
The objects stream through your computer on the way, so a large Space uses your own connection and bandwidth. If that connection drops, the copy continues where it stopped.
To bring the copy up to date later, run the workflow again. With the default deduplication policy, Skip if a file with the same name exists, only objects whose path is not at the destination yet are copied. An object that changed but kept its name is skipped too; choose Overwrite the existing file if you want those replaced.
Moving off DigitalOcean uses the same steps with a single destination. The most common move is to Amazon S3, which has the storage tiers and ecosystem Spaces lacks. How to Migrate from DigitalOcean Spaces to AWS S3 walks through it, including how Blober finds Spaces across all seven regions and how to pick an S3 storage class.
For very large Spaces with millions of objects, see Migrating 100 Million Files from DigitalOcean to Backblaze.
Does DigitalOcean Spaces support cross-region replication? No. To have a Space's objects in a second region, you copy them there yourself, for example with a Blober workflow from a Space in one region to a Space in another.
Which regions can I create a Space in? Currently NYC3, SFO3, AMS3, FRA1, SGP1, SYD1, and BLR1. DigitalOcean occasionally adds regions, so confirm on their site.
Can I move a Space from one region to another? Not in place. Create a new Space in the target region and copy the objects over. Blober streams them through your computer from one Space to the other without storing a full copy on your disk.
Is the Spaces CDN a backup? No. The CDN caches objects at the edge for faster delivery and can evict them at any time. The durable copy still sits in one region, so a backup needs a separate copy in another region or provider.
How do I migrate from DigitalOcean to AWS? Connect both in Blober, set DigitalOcean as the source and S3 as the destination, and run. The DigitalOcean Spaces to AWS S3 guide covers it step by step.