What is a snapshot?

A snapshot captures the state of a volume or instance disk at a point in time. Snapshots can be:

  • Used to restore a volume to a known-good state.
  • Cloned into new volumes for testing or staging environments.
  • Retained on a schedule as part of your backup policy.

Creating a snapshot

  1. Navigate to the instance or volume you wish to snapshot.
  2. Click Create snapshot.
  3. Provide a descriptive name and optional tags such as env=prod or before-upgrade.

Restoring from a snapshot

Restoration typically involves cloning the snapshot to a new volume and attaching it to an instance:

  1. From the snapshot detail page, choose Create volume from snapshot.
  2. Attach the new volume to a test instance to validate data integrity.
  3. Once verified, attach to your production instance and update mount points.