Snapshots are used to back up the persistent disks in GCE. However, it is different from backup the disk images, as they are created to be used periodically. In other words, If we create the subsequent snapshots, only the first snapshot will backup the entire persistent disk and the other snaps will only have the incremental backups.
The incremental snapshots will have the reference to prior snapshots for the duplicate data and will contain the updated data or newly added data. This method will reduce the total storage to be used for storing the data and thus it reduces the billing too.
How to take the snapshot through the web console
Let us see the steps through console first and then followed by the command-line tool
Go to disk and select the appropriate disk which needs to be backed up,
Provide the snapshot name and location where the snapshot to be stored, either a specific region or multi-region
Depending on the attempts and size of the disk, it may take some time. Once created successfully, you could view the entry in the dashboard
How to take the snapshot through command-line
Let us see how to create a snapshot through gcloud tool. Execute the below command for creating a snapshot. Make sure to pass the zone.
gcloud compute disks snapshot disk-1 --zone us-central1-a
Once created, verify the status of the created snapshot
gcloud compute snapshots list
You can also verify the snapshot list in the dashboard as well,
Snapshot Schedule
This will automate the process of taking the snapshot at a certain interval. This option would be highly leveraged in the production environment system. In this option, we can also choose how frequently the snapshots to be created, when the process should start, and how long it requires to keep for.
Go to snapshot schedule in compute engine,
Provide the appropriate name and select the location where the snapshots to be stored
Here, select time interval, based on the requirement,
The above settings will take snapshots daily between 16-17 UTC time and the snapshots more than 14 days old, will be deleted automatically.
To restore the data from the created snapshot, please follow the next tutorial.