Snapshot
Noun · Development
Definitions
A point-in-time capture of the complete state of a system — such as a filesystem, database, or virtual machine — that can be used for backup, recovery, or consistent reads. In databases with MVCC (like PostgreSQL), a snapshot provides a consistent view of data as of a specific transaction ID without blocking writers.
In plain English: A saved picture of everything in a system at one moment in time, like a save point you can go back to if something goes wrong.
Example: "We take an EBS snapshot every hour so we can restore the database to any hourly checkpoint in the last 30 days."