Common Snapshot Usage Scenarios and How to Minimize Snapshot Fees

As a convenient and efficient data protection service, snapshots are recommended for the following business scenarios:
daily backup of system disks and data disks. You can use snapshots to regularly back up important business data to deal with the risk of data loss caused by misoperations, attacks, and viruses.
Change the operating system. Before major operations such as application software upgrade or business data migration, you can create one or more data snapshots. Once any problems occur during the upgrade or migration process, you can use the data snapshots to restore the normal system data state in time.
Multi-copy applications of production data. By creating snapshots of production data, you can provide near real-time real production data for applications such as data mining, report query, development and testing.


Retain a reasonable number of


snapshots Snapshots are charged according to the storage capacity occupied. Therefore, the more snapshots retained, the larger the storage capacity occupied, and the cost of snapshots will increase accordingly. Therefore, in order to reduce unnecessary snapshot usage costs, it is recommended that you set a reasonable snapshot policy and retain an appropriate number of snapshots based on actual business needs.
The business scenarios and recommendations are shown in the table below.
Description of service type snapshot frequency retention time
Core business takes snapshots every day or every two or three days for several months or longer None
Non-core businesses take snapshots every week or every two weeks for several days or weeks None
System disks are reserved on demand for 1-2 A snapshot means that the system disk generally does not involve business data.
Software upgrades or business data migration should be deleted in a timely manner as needed. After confirming that there is no problem with the new business data, delete it in time to avoid forgetting, resulting in unnecessary costs for long-term retention.
The test environment should be deleted in time as needed. After the test, delete it in time to avoid forgetting, resulting in unnecessary costs for long-term retention.

In this way, regular backup of data can be achieved without incurring excessively expensive costs. At the same time, Snapshot supports prepaid storage packages and pay-as-you-go post-payment models, allowing you to choose a consumption model that suits you.

How to delete snapshots that have created mirrors and disks


Snapshots , mirrors, disks, and instances are currently bound. The function of resetting the system disk and initializing the disk all depends on the above bindings. In April 2017, we have decoupled the binding relationship between "image and instance" and "snapshot and disk".
The image of an instance that has been created can be deleted separately, but after deletion, similar business operations that depend on the original image data, such as re-initializing the disk, cannot be operated;
the snapshot of the disk that has been created can be deleted separately. Business operations of the original snapshot data state, such as re-initializing the disk, cannot be performed;
a snapshot of an image has been created, and before deletion, the corresponding image must be deleted before it can be deleted.