All Products
Search
Document Center

Elastic Compute Service:Optimize snapshot costs

Last Updated:May 13, 2025

Snapshots are frequently used features in data backup and disaster recovery plans. Alibaba Cloud charges snapshot storage fees in each region based on snapshot size and duration. This topic provides strategies to help you reduce snapshot costs.

  • View snapshot size.

  • For information about snapshot billing, see Snapshots. You can understand the snapshot fees generated in each region based on the snapshot bills in the Expenses and Costs console. For more information, see View snapshot bills.

Important

Deleting snapshots or canceling automatic snapshot policies permanently removes snapshot data, which cannot be recovered or accessed afterward. 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 duration. Therefore, the more snapshots you retain and the longer you retain them, the higher the snapshot fees. We recommend that you adopt a reasonable snapshot creation frequency and retention period based on your actual business requirements.

Business type

Snapshot frequency

Snapshot retention period

Description

Core application

Once every day or every other day

Several months or longer

Create and store snapshots based on the importance of the data.

Non-core application

Once every week or every other week

Several days or weeks

Create and store snapshots based on the importance of the data.

Software upgrade

Based on requirements

Delete snapshots immediately if you do not require them.

Delete snapshots that you no longer require to reduce costs.

Modification of critical files

Migration of application data

Test environment

Optimize automatic snapshot policies

  • If your business no longer requires regular snapshot creation for data backup, we recommend that you disassociate automatic snapshot policies from your disks to prevent continuous automatic snapshot creation and reduce snapshot storage costs. For more information, see Configure an automatic snapshot policy for a cloud disk.

  • By default, the lifecycle of automatic snapshots follows the retention period of the automatic snapshot policy and are not deleted when the disk is released. To automatically delete automatic snapshots when the disk is released, enable the Delete Automatic Snapshots While Releasing Disk attribute.

    Important

    After you enable the Delete Automatic Snapshots While Releasing Disk attribute, when a disk is released (such as manually released, released with an instance, or during system disk replacement), the automatic snapshots are deleted along with the disk even if they have not expired.

Archive snapshots

For snapshots that do not need to be accessed frequently but need to be stored for a long time, archive them. Appropriately converting standard snapshots to archive snapshots can reduce snapshot storage costs. For more information, see Archive a snapshot.

Delete unnecessary snapshots

When you no longer need a snapshot or the number of snapshots exceeds the quota, delete some snapshots to free up space and reduce snapshot fees. For more information, see Delete a snapshot.

Note

For information about Alibaba Cloud snapshot quota limits, see Limits.

Others

If snapshots do not need cross-region disaster recovery and usage, you can stop copying snapshots across regions to reduce the data transfer fees for cross-region snapshot replication and the snapshot storage fees generated in the destination region.