Depends on the solution, but in many systems snapshots are cheap, like zfs or btrfs. I can imagine ceph snapshots being quite cheap too. Edit: people use snaps

Depends on the solution, but in many systems snapshots are cheap, like zfs or btrfs. I can imagine ceph snapshots being quite cheap too. Edit: people use snapshots to compliment backups too, you can do snapshots hourly and back a snapshot up daily. (They don't act as backups, more like "oops" revert solutions, humans are more likely to fail than machines) If you're using VMware or Hyper-V the backups rely on a dirty "bitmap" of which blocks has been written since last backup so it only has to pull those from the system, this doesn't work with more snapshots for some reason. Enterprise backup solutions will just pull the entire machine and compare what's changed anyways, but you usually get a warning about it. So grumpy admins