Their snapshots were perfect — and totally useless

Their snapshots were perfect — and totally useless

Startup wanted to leave their cloud provider after a price hike. "We have 90 days of snapshots, we're fine." Then they learned the snapshots only restore inside that same provider's platform. Locked in. To actually export the data they had to spin the VMs back up and rsync everything out — 3 days of work and a final $2,200 bill to the vendor they were trying to escape.

A snapshot you can't take elsewhere isn't a backup. It's a hostage note. Fight me in the comments.