Snapshots, archives, backups, and disaster recovery

There are many technologies that are either confused with backups, or may be a component of a backup. In this section I want to break down these basics and make sure that we understand what they are, why they matter, how they are used, and when we should leverage them ourselves.

Snapshots

In our last section we talked about taking block device images, how images and snapshots are truly the same thing, and what people tend to mean when using the term snapshot instead of the term images. Now we are going to really delve into snapshots.

Snapshots, as people tend to use the term, are amazing tools for doing some extraordinary things with storage. Snapshots are typically used to grab a momentary image of the state of a block storage device. The term snapshot is very descriptive in this case.

For most snapshot systems, and as it is intended by most people using the term, the snapshot that is taken is kept on local storage along...