A snapshot can be generated quickly and occupy a small amount of storage space.

• A. True
• B. False
• C. Only read-only data
• D. Requires special hardware

Answer: (A)

Snapshots are lightweight by design: they capture the state of a dataset without duplicating all its data. In many storage systems, a snapshot is created by recording metadata and creating pointers to the existing blocks. With copy-on-write (or redirect-on-write), the actual data blocks aren’t copied at creation time; instead, data blocks are shared between the live dataset and the snapshot. Only when data is written does the system allocate new blocks for the changing data, preserving the previous state for the snapshot. This is why a snapshot can be generated quickly and occupies a small amount of storage at the moment of creation. Over time, as changes accumulate, the snapshot’s storage usage may increase, since some blocks diverge, but the initial snapshot is indeed fast to create and space-efficient.