Capture Versus Snapshot

Question

_{Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:06 AM}

can someone explain me in virtual machines the meaning of capture and snapshot

All replies (2)

_{Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:57 AM ✅Answered}

Hi,

Thanks for posting here.

Capturing a VM creates an image(not meant for backup) that can be used to create multiple VMs based on that same image. You can capture a VM using the Capture option in the portal, the Save-AzureVMImage Azure PowerShell cmdlet, using azure vm capture in the Azure CLI tool, or the Capture Role API.

For VM backups, there is no equivalent to the Hyper-V snapshot feature for Azure VMs. However Azure storage has a blob snapshot feature that allows you to create a backup of the VHD blob in Azure storage. Microsoft does not currently provide a tool for creating blob snapshots, though third-party storage tools such as CloudXplorer include this feature. And you can write custom code to call the Snapshot Blob API to create a blob snapshot.

You can also create a copy of a VHD using Azure storage tools.  Most of the commonly used Azure storage tools also allow you to download files to on-premises. This forum post has steps to download the VHD using CloudXplorer. You can use any similar storage tools to perform the same task.

Regards.

_{Friday, August 18, 2017 9:00 AM}

Hi Shreya, Does this still applies. I have the same question.