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Incremental snapshots of managed disks on Azure is a relatively new thing, and is not completely documented, so I have a crucial question:

If I have incremental snapshots A, B, C and D of a disk (the first one being an explicit full snapshot), and D with the latest state, is it safe to delete snapshots B and C without losing data? By this I'm considering two cases:

  1. Restoring/creating a new managed disk from incremental snapshot D? Are all changes going to be consistent with the latest "real" state?

  2. Copying to a new region. it has been touted on multiple places in the documentation that these incremental snapshots allow for partial copying to another region or storage account, so custom disaster recovery can be achieved without the need to copy over the whole blob backing the managed snapshot. I tried it and it works, but would this still be possible if intermediate snapshots (B and C in my example) are deleted?

On AWS this is normal, because deleting incremental snapshot on AWS only removes the data existing in that particular snapshot, no longer referenced by later ones.

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This question is answered here; https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/announcing-general-availability-of-incremental-snapshots-of-managed-disks/

Now, if you deleted the first incremental snapshot the second and the third snapshots continue to function normally as incremental snapshots are independent of each other. The system merges the data occupied by the first snapshot with the second snapshot under the hood to ensure that the second and the third snapshots are not impacted due to the deletion of the first snapshot.

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