A technician needs to install an OS patch on a virtual server. Which of the following backup types should the technician perform prior to the patch installation that will allow the server to be…

A snapshot preserves the complete state of a virtual machine - including disk, memory, and configuration - at a precise moment in time, allowing the hypervisor to revert to that state in seconds or minutes. Unlike traditional backup types, no data needs to be read from backup media and reconstructed, making it by far the fastest recovery method for virtual servers.

An incremental backup only stores changes since the last backup job, so restoring requires applying the full backup plus every subsequent incremental in sequence, which is time-consuming.

A differential backup captures all changes since the last full backup, requiring both the full and the differential set to restore, which is slower than a snapshot revert.

A full backup captures all data but must be written to and read back from backup storage, making the restoration process significantly slower than reverting a hypervisor snapshot.