Let's say I need a long-term backup for a webserver in Google Cloud Platform.
I need to have a possibility to access to the state or restore the state of the machine up to 1 year ago. (Weekly snapshots will be ok.)
Are snapshots a proper solution for such long-term backups?
- Can I have snapshots which are 1 year old?
- Can I have 54 snapshots for one disk?
- Can I switch/restore to older snapshot without loosing more frequent ones?
- Can I switch back to current snapshot?
- Will 54 snapshots reduce read/write efficiency?
- Can I loose all snapshots in any silly way? Like deleting VM or restoring VM in wrong way?
- I know I can create new instance and select snapshot as a boot disk? Will snapshot be converted to a new disk or new instance will be depended of snapshot?
If snapshots are not a correct way for long-term backups, what is a correct way?