Snapshots should not be used as a long-term production backup solution. Snapshots are a copy of files stored within the same datastore. As a consequence of this, if a datastore is lost, the virtual machine and snapshot is also lost. However, snapshots do provide consumers with the ability to quickly take temporary near-line backups of the current state of their virtual machines to mitigate risk during change management windows, allowing a quick restore procedure when there is need to return to a previous configuration.