Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > Guides > Design Guide — MySQL InnoDB Cluster on Dell EMC PowerStore T > Overview
Snapshots within the PowerStore system provide an easy-to-use local data protection solution to protect the data within volumes, volume groups, file systems, VMs, and thin clones. They can also be used for repurposing a database for a dev/test environment. Snapshots are not a full copy of the volumes. Instead, they consist of pointers to the data blocks and use redirect-on-write technology. Accordingly, snapshots are space-efficient and do not consume any extra space until the new data is written to the thin clone that is created from them.
Hosts cannot access snapshots unless a thin clone is created from the snapshot and presented to the host.
You can create point-in-time recovery (PITR) consistent backups by completing the following steps.
Note: In this implementation, the MySQL database was not running when the snapshot was taken. If the database is down, the following steps are not necessary.
Integrate these steps in the shell script for your daily and weekly backup solutions. PowerStore T snapshot technology backs up terabytes and petabytes in a matter of seconds. This feature is helpful for the MySQL ecosystem where the traditional approach (logical or hot backup) of creating backups takes longer and uses more network and disk bandwidth.
The following section describes how to create the production database snapshot using PowerStore T snapshot technology.