Referring to this article
I know it is not good practice to keep a snapshot longer than a day or two because the performance can degrade.
The chain will very rarely go above 4 or 5
However we have a couple of application that before we can push to production have to be tested by the vendor.
Most are pretty good about getting in and testing within a couple days of the snapshot being taken, however there are a few who take a week or more.
There have a been a couple instances, maybe 3 or 4 in the past year we had to a do either a full system restore or a file level restore because the application did not work and we had to revert to the previous application and the snapshot had already been deleted.
The boxes are fairly busy, logging, email, etc.
How do other organizations deal with this? Is there a way to "backup" the snapshots?