A software company recently moved all of its development testing to a public cloud environment. The company primarily uses IaaS to deploy and test its code. The company needs the software developers…

Snapshots are point-in-time VM state captures useful for immediate rollback scenarios but are not a traditional backup type designed for efficient repeated, long-term protection in a continuous development workflow.

A full backup copies all data on every run, making it slow to execute and impractical for the frequent backups needed in a fast-moving dev environment where storage efficiency and backup speed matter.

Because incremental backups transfer only blocks or files changed since the previous backup, they execute rapidly and can be scheduled at high frequency without disrupting active development work in a cloud IaaS environment. This high cadence means the most recent restore point is always very close in time to any failure event, minimizing the data and work lost during recovery and effectively providing the speedy return-to-work capability that agile developers need.

Differential backups grow progressively larger because they capture all changes since the last full backup, causing both backup duration and storage consumption to increase over time, making them less efficient than incrementals for frequent agile checkpoints.