Why choose Gandi for your hosting service?
What is a snapshot?
It is a copy of your disk (system or data), in a specific moment, without having to stop your server or to reboot it. The main interest of this functionality is to create a backup of a disk in a particular moment (new installation, configuration, etc) or for a planned structure.
This functionality is also very useful to clone a server, by making a snapshot of the data system, for example.
If you use the snapshot for a backup, you just need the extra disk space of the size of the disk that is copied.
The restore of a disk via snapshot is easy and fast.