I can never remember tar command line arguments to do a simple backup of the filesystem, so this time I’ll write it down.

mkdir -p /backups
cd /backups
tar -zcvpf /backups/img.tar.gz --directory=/ --exclude=proc --exclude=sys --exclude=dev/pts --exclude=backups .
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

# wget http://$SERVER_IP:8000/img.tar.gz

Stolen from: https://old.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/475a9b/is_there_a_way_to_download_digital_ocean_server/