Cartika has warned cloud users that, while cloud server snapshots are a useful tool, they should not be considered a reliable and complete backup solution.
A snapshot represents the state of a server at a particular point in time. They can be used to quickly restore a server to a previous state. But snapshots have several limitations that don’t impact alternative backup strategies.
Snapshots data is typically held on the same storage devices as production data, snapshots are not compatible between hypervisor systems, and the restoration of specific files from snapshots is time-consuming and often impractical.
"Snapshots are absolutely a useful and critical tool, and certainly represent some sort of backup, but, should they really be counted on or used as a backup?" asks Cartika CEO Andrew Rouchotas. "The answer is likely not, and certainly not in most common use case scenarios."
