Storage
What is Snapshot?
A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of a virtual machine disk, taken instantly and stored on the same infrastructure. Snapshots protect against your own mistakes and are ideal before an upgrade. They are not backups: if the underlying storage is lost, the snapshots go with it.
Why Snapshot matters
Snapshots protect against your own mistakes and are ideal before an upgrade. They are not backups: if the underlying storage is lost, the snapshots go with it.
Snapshot in practice
Look at the snapshot list before you touch anything: it shows disk state, not memory state. Take one right before a kernel upgrade or a config change; it costs seconds and no downtime. Restoring rolls back the filesystem, so anything written after the snapshot is lost. A snapshot shared on the same host means a failed disk takes the snapshot with it. Treat it as undo, not insurance.
What people get wrong about Snapshot
People assume snapshots are backups. They are not. Snapshot sits on the same infrastructure, so storage loss kills both. The published definition says it outright, but the error persists. Correct: use snapshots for rollback after risky changes; use the nightly encrypted backups for disaster recovery.
Snapshot — common questions
Does taking a snapshot pause my server?
No. Snapshots are taken instantly without pausing the instance. You can keep serving traffic while the snapshot is created. That is the point: it is a point-in-time copy that does not interrupt your workload.
What is the difference between a snapshot and a backup?
A snapshot lives on the same infrastructure as the instance. If that storage is lost, the snapshot is gone too. A backup, like our nightly encrypted ones, copies data to a second jurisdiction. Snapshots are for quick rollback; backups are for real recovery.
Where Snapshot comes up
- What is the best VPS setup for a beginner? Start with 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS in the region closest to you. Ubuntu has the largest body of tutorials, which matters more than any spe…
- What is a snapshot and how is it different from a backup? A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of your instance's disk, taken instantly and stored on the same infrastructure. A backup is a copy stored elsewhere. Sna…
- A production Docker Compose stack on a VPS A workable production stack is Caddy for automatic TLS, your application, PostgreSQL and Redis, defined in one Compose file with named volumes and health c…
- Do I need a managed VPS? You need managed hosting if nobody on your side will apply security updates, configure a firewall or restore a backup. Managed plans cost two to five times…
- How do I secure a new VPS? Five steps cover the overwhelming majority of real-world compromises: key-based SSH with password authentication disabled, no direct root login, a default-…
- How do I back up a VPS properly? Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies, on two kinds of media, one off-site. In practice that means snapshots for quick rollback, plus an encrypted nightly ba…
More from storage
- NVMe
- NVMe is a storage protocol that connects solid-state drives directly over PCIe, reaching roughly 500,000 random IOPS with sub-100-microsecond latency.
- IOPS
- IOPS measures how many individual read or write operations a storage device completes per second.
- RAID 10
- RAID 10 mirrors data across pairs of drives and stripes across the mirrors, giving both redundancy and high performance at the cost of half the raw capacity.