This topic describes how to reduce snapshot storage costs by maintaining a reasonable number of snapshots, optimizing automatic snapshot policies, and archiving snapshots.
After a snapshot is deleted, the data in the snapshot cannot be recovered or accessed. Ensure that deleting snapshots does not affect your business operations and meets compliance requirements.
Maintain a reasonable number of snapshots
Snapshot storage fees are charged based on snapshot size and retention period. Therefore, the more snapshots you retain and the longer you retain them, the higher the snapshot fees. You should create snapshots at a reasonable frequency and specify a reasonable retention period based on your business needs.
Business type | Creation frequency | Snapshot retention period | Description |
Core application | Once every one to two days | Several months or longer | Based on data importance |
Non-core application | Create a snapshot every week or two. | Several days or weeks | Based on data importance |
Software upgrade | Create snapshots as needed | Delete promptly | Avoid unnecessary charges for long-term retention. |
Critical file modification | |||
Application data migration | |||
Test environment |
When you no longer need a snapshot or the number of snapshots exceeds the quota, you can delete snapshots to free up space and reduce snapshot fees.
Optimize automatic snapshot policies
If your business no longer requires regular snapshot creation for data backup, you can disassociate automatic snapshot policies from your disks to prevent new automatic snapshots from being created and reduce your snapshot storage costs.
By default, the lifecycle of an automatic snapshot is determined by the retention period of its automatic snapshot policy, and the snapshot is not deleted when the disk is released. To automatically delete snapshots when you release the associated disk, you can enable the corresponding property.
ImportantAfter you enable the Delete Automatic Snapshots While Releasing Disk property, when a disk is released (for example, by manual release, along with an instance, or during a system disk replacement), its automatic snapshots are deleted along with the disk even if they have not expired.
Go to ECS console - Block Storage. In the top navigation bar, select the target region and resource group.
In the Actions column of the target disk, click Modify Attributes.
In the Modify Disk Attributes dialog box, select Delete Automatic Snapshots While Releasing Disk, and then click Confirm.
You can clear this selection later to disable this feature.
If you do not require cross-region disaster recovery for your snapshots, you can disable cross-region replication policies to reduce data transfer fees for cross-region snapshot replication and snapshot storage fees in the destination region.
Archive snapshots
For snapshots that you do not need to access frequently but must store for a long time, you can archive them. Convert standard snapshots to archive snapshots to reduce snapshot storage costs.
Archiving some snapshots of a disk may not reduce costs. For more information about how snapshot size is calculated, see How snapshot size is calculated.
For example, you can archive all standard snapshots (Snapshot A, Snapshot B, and Snapshot C) of a disk in the China (Hangzhou) region for two months. The following table compares the costs before and after archiving. In the China (Hangzhou) region, the unit prices are:
Standard snapshot: USD 0.0173 per GB-month
Archive snapshot: USD 0.0085 per GB-month
The prices in this example are for reference only. For information about actual prices, see the Pricing tab of the ECS product page.
The total cost is lower after the snapshots are archived. This demonstrates that archiving all snapshots of a disk can help you reduce storage costs.
Item | Standard snapshot size | Archive snapshot size | Standard snapshot fee | Archive snapshot fee | Total snapshot fee |
Before archiving | 50 GB | None | USD 0.0173 × 50 GB × 2 = USD 1.73 | None | USD 1.73 |
After archiving | None | 50 GB | None | USD 0.0085 × 50 GB × 2 = USD 0.85 | USD 0.85 |
References
To view the size of a snapshot, see View snapshot size.
For more information about snapshot billing, see Snapshot billing. You can view snapshot fees for each region on the Snapshot Bills page in the Alibaba Cloud Management Console. For more information, see View detailed snapshot bills.