Solved: First snapshot of a disk is of size O B - Page 2

Sourav97 · 02-18-2025 11:12 PM

Hello,

Today I had taken an instant snapshot of the boot disk of a server and it is the first snapshot , but the size of the snapshot is 0 B.

It would have been genuine if there would been incremental snapshots. But in this case , there are no incremental snapshots here.

Can anyone please help me with this query?

FrancoGP

Hi @Sourav97 ,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

Take this with a grain of salt, but I firmly belive this is the answer to you query.
While you are right, snapshots are incremental with the first one being full, instant snapshots and standard snapshots as they have different use cases, they have different mechanisms as well, to ensure the speed of taking the snap and restore, all data is not copied to the snapshot itself as a regular one, it just copies the metadata of your disk and data to know how and where to restore it, and this values are not contemplated in you snapshot size, this is an in-place solution so again, all data won't be copied the same way as in a standard snap, just the pointers (for the first snap)
Any forward modification of files and configurations should be contemplated on your snap.

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