Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

Snapshots

Snapshots freeze or capture the state of a virtual machine at a point in time. This is not a full backup of a VM, since the snapshots are fully dependent on the original VM. We cannot move snapshots elsewhere for safekeeping. Snapshots are used to roll back to a previous state. Since snapshots do not back up the entire virtual machine with disk images, they are the fastest backup option to quickly save the state of the VM. In Proxmox, we can take snapshots of a running VM; in which case, the content of the running memory also gets saved. This way, we can revert to the earlier VM exactly as it was running when a snapshot was taken.

A good use case of this backup is when testing software or applying updates. We can take snapshots ...