Home > Storage > PowerStore > Data Protection > Dell PowerStore: Snapshots and Thin Clones > Overview
As data becomes increasingly important to organizations of all types, these organizations continually strive to find the safest and most effective ways to protect their data. While many methods of data protection exist, one of the simplest and most-effective methods involves using snapshots. Snapshots allow recovery of data by rolling back to an older point-in-time or copying select data from the snapshot. Snapshots continue to be an essential data-protection mechanism that is used across a wide variety of industries and use cases. Snapshots can preserve the most important mission-critical production data, sometimes with other data-protection technologies.
Dell PowerStore provides a simple but powerful approach to local data protection using snapshots. PowerStore uses the same snapshot technology across all the resources within the system, including volumes, volume groups, file systems, virtual machines, and thin clones. Snapshots use thin, redirect-on-write technology to ensure that system space is used optimally and reduces the management burden by never requiring administrators to designate protection space. Snapshots can be created manually through PowerStore Manager, PowerStore CLI, REST API, or automatically using protection policies. Protection policies can be created and assigned to quickly create local and remote protection on supported resources.
A thin clone is a read/write copy of a volume, volume group, NAS server, or file system. Thin clones use the same underlying pointer-based technology that snapshots use to create multiple copies of storage resources. Thin clones support many data services, which engineers and developers can leverage in their environments. When users create a thin clone, it acts as a regular resource and is listed with the other resources of the system. Like snapshots, users can create, manage, and destroy thin clones through PowerStore Manager, PowerStore CLI, and REST API.
Ansible Modules are available for PowerStore which allows data center and IT administrators to automate and orchestrate the configuration and management of PowerStore appliances. The Ansible modules have wide ranging capabilities including managing volumes, volume groups, hosts, host groups, snapshots, protection policies, and gather detailed information about the appliance. These different tasks can be performed by running simple playbooks written in yaml syntax.