When a snapshot is copied from one storage account to another, it occupies the same space as the base page blob. You can also copy a snapshot over its base blob, which is like restoring the blob to an earlier version. Snapshots can be copied to another storage account as a blob to keep backups of the base blob. With the REST version and above, you can also copy incremental snapshots.

Until REST version, you had the ability to copy full snapshots.

Snapshots provide a way to back up a blob as it appears at a moment in time. Once a snapshot has been created, it can be read, copied, or deleted, but not modified. What is a snapshot?Ī blob snapshot is a read-only version of a blob that is captured at a point in time. To learn more about snapshots, refer to Creating a Snapshot of a Blob. Since we are describing a backup strategy for virtual machine disks in this article, we refer to snapshots in the context of page blobs. For virtual machines running business or mission critical workloads, it's recommended to use Azure Backup as part of the backup strategy.Īzure virtual machine disks are stored as page blobs in Azure Storage. You can use this methodology when you choose not to use Azure Backup and Recovery Service, and wish to create a custom backup strategy for your virtual machine disks. In this article, we describe a scenario in which you can maintain backups of virtual machine disks using snapshots. Snapshots capture the blob state at that point in time. Azure Storage provides the capability to take snapshots of blobs.

Drive snapshot to virtual machine