Google Cloud Snapshots

One can create snapshots from disks even while they are attached to running VM instances
Snapshots are Global resources, so any snapshot is accessible by any resource in any zone within the same project
Snapshots are incremental and automatically compressed, so a customer can create regular snapshots on a persistent disk faster and at a much lower cost than if they regularly created a full image of the disk
Compute Engine stores multiple copies of each snapshot across multiple locations with automatic checksums to ensure the integrity of the data
When creating a snapshot, a customer can specify a storage location. The location of a snapshot affects its availability and can incur networking costs when creating the snapshot or restoring it to a new disk
Snapshots can be stored in either Cloud Storage multi-regional location or Cloud Storage regional location
A multi-regional storage location provides higher availability and might reduce network costs when creating or restoring a snapshot (as long as the new persistent disk is created in one of the regions of the multi-regional location)
A regional storage location gives a customer more control over the physical location of their data because they specify a single region
If a customer does not specify a storage location for a snapshot, Google Cloud uses the default location, which stores their snapshot in a Cloud Storage multi-regional location closest to the region of the source disk
If a customer stores their snapshot in the same region as their source disk there is no network charge when they access that snapshot from the same region. If they access the snapshot from a different region, there is a network cost
If a customers source disk geographic storage location is the same as its multi-region, there is no network charge
There is a network charge for cross-region access
If a customer is repeatedly using a snapshot in the same zone to create a persistent disk, they can save networking costs by using the snapshot once and creating an image of that snapshot
As a best practice, take a snapshot of the disk once per hour. The easiest way to achieve this is to set up a snapshot schedule
If a customer creates a snapshot of a persistent disk, any data that they store on the disk is included in the snapshot. Larger amounts of data create larger snapshots, which cost more and take longer to create. To ensure that a customer creates a snapshot of only the data they need, they need to organize their data on separate persistent disks