Snapshots are a valuable feature virtualization offers business continuity. Organizations can create point in time recovery points numerous times a day by creating snapshots. Snapshots record all changes to a virtual machine so that the machine can be restored to the state at which the snapshot was taken. This is especially important when making changes to a virtual server because changes do not always work as planned. If a change impacts a system negatively, the virtual server can quickly be rolled back to the state it was in prior to the change by using snapshots.

Snapshots also increase the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) by enabling the organization to recover a system to some point in time during the day after the daily backups have been taken. Many systems may only be backed up once a day but snapshots can be taken throughout the day. If a failure occurs during the day you can recover back to the snapshot and lose less data than if you had to recover all the way back to the previous night’s backup. This assumes, of course, that the snapshots have not been damaged along with the system.