Are Google Cloud Platform (GCP) persistent disk snapshots a proper way for doing long-term backups?

Solution 1:

Here are inline responses to your queries -

1. Yes and even older, you can define how long you want to keep your snapshots in the snapshot retention policy.
2. Yes. The only constraint here is that you can snapshot your disks at most once every 10 minutes, if you require more frequency than that then you can go with cloning your disk, which features a rate of 1 disk clone every 30 seconds.
3. Yes, you can see the list of snapshots by using command ‘gcloud compute snapshots list’, you can choose any without losing others.
4. You can create a new instance with the current snapshot.
5. It does in VMware but never heard of such issues in GCP.
6. Deleting/restoring VMs won’t delete snapshots. The mechanisms are very foolproof and have several failsafes; one, for example, If you attempt to create a snapshot from a zonal persistent disk and the snapshotting process fails, you won't be able to delete the original zonal persistent disk until you have cleaned up the failed snapshot. This failsafe helps to prevent the accidental deletion of source data in the event of an unsuccessful backup.
7. When you create an instance from a snapshot, it still creates a disk.

Check out this doc and this video for additional information.