Managing Snapshots

This section provide information about managing snapshots.

A snapshot is a read-only image of a volume at a specific point in time. On clusters with an Enterprise Edition or higher license, you can create a snapshot manually or automate the process with a schedule. Snapshots are useful any time you need to be able to roll back to a known good data set at a specific point in time. For example, before performing a risky operation on a volume, you can create a snapshot to enable rollback capability for the entire volume.

A snapshot takes no time to create, and initially uses no disk space, because it stores only the incremental changes needed to roll the volume back to the state at the time the snapshot was created. The storage used by a volume's snapshots does not count against the volume's quota. When you view the list of volumes on your cluster in the Control System, the value of the Snap Size column is the disk space used by all of the snapshots for that volume.

Note: Snapshot volumes inherit the auditing configurations of their original read-write volumes. For details about auditing, see Auditing.

You can perform the following tasks using the Control System and the CLI.