Snapshots

• when we create a GCE VM Instance, a virtual disk is attached to it
• The copy of the virtual disk is referred as snapshot
• Lets create one linux vm instance in gcp
• Lets create a snapshot which is backup of the disk
• First snapshot is full backup of the disk, from there on all the snapshots are incremental in nature
• Now lets login into the linux vm and install tomcat and create a snashot
• If you want to take the backup of the disk periodically, we can create scheduled snapshots
• If we delete older snapshots, the data of the older snapshot gets copied into newer snapshot. If we delete the newest snapshot we would have the recent data loss.
• Lets create an instance from the snapshot
• Snapshots are multi-regional by default but we can create snapshots specific to a particular region.

Exercise:

• Create a ubuntu vm in us-central1 region with free tier
• Navigate to the disks and verify the disk used
• Login into the vm and execute the following command

sudo df -h
sudo lsblk

• Lets try to add one more disk to this vm instance

  • Lets create an empty disk of size 10 GB in Same Zone as VM

  • Lets create one more empty disk of size 10 gb in different zone

  • Navigate to vm instance and edit the vm instance and click on attach existing disk

• Once the settings are saved login into vm and execute

sudo lsblk

• Now using linux commands we can create partititions or create a file system and mount the new disk to some folder
• Now try creating the same for disks created in different zone and different region.