As enterprises move their mission-critical workloads to the cloud, ensuring robust data protection and continuity is just as essential as delivering high-performance, scalable, and low-latency storage. IBM Cloud File Storage stands out as an enterprise-grade solution purpose-built to meet these requirements.

IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC offers zonal, NFS-based file storage optimized for performance, scalability, and security—tailored to enterprise demands. We're excited to announce the general availability (GA) of File Storage Snapshots across all IBM Cloud regions—a powerful new capability that strengthens the resilience and reliability of our storage offering.

Feature Overview: Understanding Snapshots

IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC enables you to create file shares within an availability zone and share them across multiple Virtual Server Instances (VSIs) in the same or different zones and VPCs.

The newly launched File Storage Snapshots feature allows you to create point-in-time copies of a File Storage for VPC share within a zone. The initial snapshot is a complete backup of the share, while subsequent snapshots are incremental, capturing only changes since the last snapshot. This optimizes storage space, reducing costs for cloud customers.

Key highlights include:

• Support for up to 750 snapshots per share in a zone

• Snapshots' lifecycle is linked to their parent share and are not independent resources

• Snapshots inherit the encryption settings (IBM-managed or customer-managed) of the source share

• Snapshots can be created on-demand or scheduled using the VPC backup-policy service

Restoring: Flexible Data Recovery Options

You can now restore a snapshot to create a new, fully provisioned share in the same availability zone as the original. The restored share retains the same profile, data, and metadata as the source share. Additionally, individual files can be restored to an existing share using native operating system functions on virtual server instances. When creating a new share from a snapshot, you can opt to change the customer-managed encryption key, providing flexibility for security management.

Integration with IBM cloud Backup for VPC

File Storage Snapshots integrate seamlessly with Backup for VPC, enabling customers to create backup policies and schedules for daily, weekly, or monthly snapshots—or even more frequent backups using cron-spec expressions. For details on scheduling and managing backup snapshots, refer to the Backup for VPC overview.

Snapshots also inherit the robust security features of IBM Cloud File Storage, including encryption and access control, ensuring data protection at every stage.

Additionally, Standard IBM cloud VPC features such are activity tracking and auditing, user tags & observability are available with file storage snapshots.

Use Cases and Benefits: Empowering Resilience and Efficiency

File Storage Snapshots offer versatile use cases and significant benefits for enterprises:

• Disaster Recovery: Swiftly recover from application failures by restoring a snapshot to a previous, unaffected state. With file share replication, snapshots on the source volume are automatically copied to a replica in another availability zone, enabling robust disaster recovery across zones

• Accidental Deletion or Corruption: Recover lost or corrupted files by restoring a snapshot to a new or existing share

• Migration and Upgrades: Create backups before risky migrations or upgrades to ensure data safety

• Testing and Development: Generate replicas of production environments for testing without impacting live workloads

• Backup Optimization: Incremental snapshots save storage space and reduce backup times, offering a cost-effective solution
  

These capabilities deliver speed, cost savings, and ease of use, making snapshots an essential tool for compliance, resilience, and operational efficiency.

Pricing: Transparent and Efficient

There is no additional charge for creating or restoring a snapshot. Customers are billed only for the storage consumed by snapshots per GB/month, with prorated billing for durations less than a month. The incremental nature of snapshots ensures cost efficiency by minimizing storage requirements.

Snapshot space: USD 0.1/GB/month*

*Snapshot space price for US MZRs, pricing may vary per region available here

How It Works: A Technical Overview

File Storage for VPC Snapshots enable customers to create point-in-time copies of their data within a VPC File share. The initial snapshot is a full backup, primarily consisting of metadata pointers to the share’s data blocks. This approach results in minimal storage usage for the first snapshot, regardless of the share’s size.

Subsequent snapshots capture only the changes—or "delta"—since the previous snapshot, storing pointers to modified data blocks. This incremental approach ensures that snapshots remain storage-efficient as long as new data is added. However, when existing data is deleted or overwritten, the snapshot preserves the original data, causing the snapshot’s storage footprint to grow accordingly. This design optimizes cost and performance for efficient snapshot storage management.

How to create file storage snapshot

1. Within the VPC Infrastructure section in the IBM Cloud console, access the File storage shares subsection, which will show the list of your file shares. Go ahead and click on the file share you want take snapshot of, and it will take you to your share details page. In this example, I’m going to take a snapshot of ‘test-share’:
   
   

2. On the Actions button within your file share details page, click on Create snapshot—this will open a new snapshot provisioning page:
   

3. On the Create Snapshot page, enter a name for the snapshot, then click Create to generate the snapshot.
   

4. Once created, the snapshot appears in the Snapshots tile on the file share’s details page, where you can view all snapshots for that share.
   

5. To restore a snapshot, go to the Snapshots tile, locate the desired snapshot, and click the three-dot menu next to it. Select Restore to begin the restoration process.
   

6. The restore page pre-populates the original share’s details. Adjust the size and IOPS (if needed) for the new share, then click Create file share to complete the restoration.
   

What’s Next: Unlock the Power of IBM Cloud File Storage Snapshots

File Storage Snapshots for IBM Cloud empower enterprises with robust data protection, seamless recovery, and cost-efficient backup solutions. Ready to enhance your cloud storage strategy? Explore File Storage Snapshots today.
If you are not already an IBM Cloud customer, it’s easy to sign up and get started. If you are already a customer, you can now provision file shares using the IBM Cloud Console, API or CLI.

Get up to USD 1,000 in credits for new file shares and VPC infrastructure by using the code VPC1000 at the time of provisioning or through the billing and usage section in IBM Cloud Console.

Contact Us Today!

For more information or to start your journey with IBM Cloud VPC file storage, contact our team today!