Instant access incremental snapshots: Restore without waiting
We’re thrilled to unveil instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 (Pv2) and Ultra Disk. This innovative feature offers a leading-edge snapshot experience with instant creation, quick disk restoration, and top performance—all happening simultaneously.
With instant access snapshots for Pv2 and Ultra Disk, you can start using your new disks right away, eliminating the typical wait for snapshots to become accessible. Additionally, once restored, these disks deliver near-full performance from the outset, enabling applications to get back online without delay.
When your business relies on mission-critical workloads, time is crucial—every minute lost to downtime or reduced performance affects your operations. Whether you’re implementing essential application updates, resolving unforeseen issues, scaling workloads, or preparing environments for development and testing, snapshots are vital to keep your enterprise moving smoothly.
Traditional incremental snapshots have been a cost-effective solution for safeguarding data, especially for creating point-in-time copies. However, they’ve required time-consuming processes where data had to be fully copied before the snapshots could be used for restoration, and disk performance had to reach full capacity gradually.
Instant access snapshots eliminate this delay.
As soon as a snapshot is created, you can restore new disks from it, enjoying near-full performance right from the start. This change means faster recovery, quicker scaling, and improved development cycles—altering how customers perceive snapshot functionality in the cloud.
Instant Access Snapshots in Action
When creating incremental snapshots of Pv2 and Ultra Disk, you can opt to enable instant access via the existing snapshot API. With this feature activated, snapshots enter the Instant Access state immediately upon creation, allowing you to create new disks straight away with enhanced restore performance.
Benefits of Instant Access Snapshots:
- Immediate Availability: Snapshots can be used to restore new disks right after they’re created, removing the typical wait time associated with data copying.
- Swift Restoration: Disks restored from these snapshots achieve near-full performance quickly, with low read and write latencies from the beginning.
- Cost-Effective Incremental Storage: These snapshots save only the incremental changes made after creation, thus avoiding the need for a full base snapshot and helping to manage your storage expenses.
- Cross-Zonal Restoration: Similar to standard storage, instant access snapshots allow you to restore disks to a different availability zone within the same region, providing additional deployment and recovery flexibility.
These advantages position instant access snapshots as the ideal choice for situations where immediate availability and performance are crucial.
Practical Use Cases Include:
- Quick Rollbacks: Before major software releases, use instant access snapshots to create immediate recovery points. If anything goes wrong, restoring disks is straightforward, maintaining business continuity and lowering downtime.
- Smoother Maintenance: Instant access snapshots allow you to begin maintenance activities immediately after creating a snapshot, cutting down application downtime and adhering to strict maintenance schedules.
- Rapid Scaling: Scale your stateful applications by leveraging instant access snapshots to quickly make multiple disk copies of your primary instance, for instance, adding additional SQL Server replicas. You can also swiftly create copies across different availability zones to enhance resilience.
- Updating Secondary Environments: Use instant access snapshots to quickly replicate production disks and create secondary environments for development and testing, ensuring your testing grounds are consistently aligned with production while performing at peak efficiency.
How Instant Access Snapshots Work in Practice
For Azure Database Services like PostgreSQL, instant access snapshots are essential for backup, recovery, and scaling. Picture a SaaS provider utilising PostgreSQL for an application that interacts with customers. During peak hours with increased read traffic, there’s a demand for rapid scaling. Thanks to instant access snapshots, the Azure Database Service can create snapshots from the current instance and quickly bring new disks and instances online without any waiting period. This approach enables quicker read replicas to be deployed, immediately catering to increased read traffic while efficiently managing demand.
The following customer perspective highlights how instant access snapshots enhance everyday operations:
“For Providence, instant access snapshots have changed how we refresh our Epic training and support environments. Instead of waiting for extended background copy processes, our teams can instantly create usable disks for daily training and support tasks, significantly improving operational efficiency and greatly enhancing the user experience for our clients.”
— Chris Calas, Senior Principal Service Engineer, Providence
At Microsoft Ignite 2025, Azure Storage product leaders highlighted instant access support as a pioneering development, showcasing Azure’s commitment to mission-critical workloads.
Enhancing Disk Restore Performance with Instant Access Snapshots
Standard incremental snapshots for Pv2 and Ultra Disk focus on cost efficiency and durability by securely storing point-in-time data in Standard Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS). This method offers strong resilience, making it an excellent choice for long-term backups and protection against regional failures. After the snapshot data is fully copied into Standard ZRS, it’s ready for restoring disks. While disks restored from standard snapshots can be used immediately, performance remains limited until the data copy finishes, leading to slower speeds.
Conversely, with incremental snapshots that have instant access enabled, point-in-time data stays in the original high-performance storage location throughout the specified timeframe. Consequently, snapshots can restore new disks right after creation without the usual data transfer delays. Newly restored disks benefit from high-bandwidth data access and low latency from the outset since data is delivered directly from instant access snapshots.
When you create snapshots with instant access turned on, the system begins transferring the data to Standard storage in parallel. This process ensures that, once the immediate access time elapses, a fully consolidated Standard ZRS snapshot is ready without requiring further user action.
This system architecture promotes speedy recovery, enables quicker refresh cycles, and ensures reliable performance for time-sensitive operations.
Creating Instant Access Snapshots
Instant access snapshots don’t require separate management as unique resource classes. They are simply incremental snapshots that temporarily enter the Instant Access state for a set period. Once this duration ends, snapshots automatically convert to Standard ZRS snapshots for improved reliability and long-term storage.
If you’re already acquainted with creating incremental snapshots using the Azure Snapshot API, adding instant access support will feel intuitive. You use the same commands and API endpoints, with just a single extra parameter indicating how long the snapshots will remain in that state. The Azure CLI example below shows how to enable instant access during the snapshot creation process.
Here’s how to create incremental snapshots using the Azure CLI:
< az snapshot create –resource-group
To apply instant access, simply add the InstantAccessDurationMins parameter:
< az snapshot create –resource-group
For a visual guide, check out the technical demo video showcasing how to create instant access snapshots and restore disks in Azure Portal. You’ll also discover how to seamlessly incorporate this feature into your existing snapshot processes.
Availability and Pricing
Instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk is now available in all Azure regions where these disk types are supported, making the capability accessible for your critical workloads everywhere.
The billing model is straightforward and usage-based, charging only for the extra storage capacity used and each restore operation. This keeps expenses closely aligned with your actual usage, simplifying budgeting and cost prediction. For comprehensive pricing information, refer to Managed Disk Pricing.
Getting Started
As organisations increasingly depend on time-sensitive mission-critical workloads in Azure, instant access support for incremental snapshots of Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk is a valuable resource for enhancing recovery time, streamlining operations, and scaling reliably.
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