Local snapshots provide complete copies of disk data at specific points in time and are an important method for disaster recovery. Local snapshots are stored in the same storage cluster as their source disks for fast backup and recovery of disk data. When disk data is lost, you can use a snapshot to restore the disk data to the point in time when the snapshot was created.
Prerequisites
- The ECS instance must be in the Running or Stopped state.
- The disk must be in the In Use or Expired state.
Note If a disk in the Expired state reaches its scheduled release time when a snapshot is being created for the disk, the snapshot in the Creating (Creating) state will also be released together with the disk.
Background information
A local snapshot takes seconds to create, whereas a normal snapshot takes minutes. For the differences between normal snapshots and local snapshots, see Local snapshots.
- Local snapshots can be created only for ESSDs.
- You must not perform operations that change the state of the ECS instance such as stopping or restarting the instance.
- While snapshots are being created, incremental data generated by operations on disks will not be included in the snapshots.
- If you create an extended volume from a single multi-partition disk, the snapshot that you created can be used to roll back the disk.
- When a disk is used to create a dynamic extended volume or RAID array, we recommend that you stop applications from writing data to the dynamic extended volume or RAID array and refresh the cached data to the disk. Stop all I/O operations before you create a snapshot.
- Created snapshots are permanently stored unless you delete them. We recommend that you delete unnecessary snapshots at regular intervals to prevent extra fees incurred by snapshot storage.
Create a local snapshot from the ECS console
The following operations demonstrate how to create a snapshot for an instance from the Instances page in the ECS console:
You can also choose
from the left-side navigation pane of the ECS console to create a snapshot for a disk.