In virtualized environments, snapshots are a powerful safety net. Whether you’re patching a critical system, updating a legacy application, or rolling out changes across multiple VMs or containers—snapshots allow you to “freeze” the current state and roll back if needed.
But with great power comes great responsibility.
The Hidden Danger: Growing Snapshots
What many teams underestimate is the impact of unused or forgotten snapshots. Each snapshot is not just a checkpoint in time—it’s also a diverging storage delta. Over time, snapshots grow as more writes are redirected away from the base image. This leads to:
- Increased disk space usage
- Longer backup times
- Potential VM performance degradation
- Complications with replication or migration
Left unmonitored, these snapshots silently accumulate until you’re suddenly out of storage—or worse, unable to take a new backup because of corrupted or outdated snapshot chains.
Cross-Team Challenges: Who Owns the Cleanup?
In many IT environments, especially where infrastructure and application teams are separate, snapshots are often created during maintenance or rollout windows by one team, but cleanup is left undocumented or assumed to be handled by another. This leads to:
- Snapshots without expiration dates
- No ownership or automated deletion policies
- Lack of transparency into what exists and why
The result? A slow buildup of technical debt and disk consumption.
No Native Monitoring in Proxmox (Yet)
Despite Proxmox being an excellent open-source virtualization platform, it lacks native tools to monitor snapshot age or volume across VMs and containers. While qm listsnapshot and pct listsnapshot provide basic information, there’s no integrated reporting, alerting, or cleanup dashboard.
For production environments—or even homelabs with limited storage—that’s a serious oversight.
My Solution: Lightweight Snapshot Reporting Script
To address this gap, I built a snapshot reporting script that regularly scans both QEMU VMs and LXC containers in Proxmox. It collects:
- VM ID and name
- Snapshot name
- Snapshot creation date
- Description metadata
The output is formatted as a clean, column-aligned table and can be emailed on a schedule. You can easily filter by age or integrate it into your daily monitoring routines.
Download and Source
👉 Get the latest version from GitHub:
Includes:
- Full source code
- Sample configuration
- Troubleshooting guide
Why This Matters
Snapshot monitoring isn’t just about saving storage. It’s about:
- Accountability: Knowing who created a snapshot and why
- Governance: Ensuring snapshots don’t persist beyond their purpose
- Stability: Avoiding performance or backup issues
- Transparency: Giving infrastructure teams a clear picture of system state
Final Thoughts
Snapshots are like post-it notes stuck to your infrastructure. A few are helpful. Hundreds? Chaotic.
If you’re running Proxmox, you likely need to address this blind spot too. Since there’s no out-of-the-box solution, I created one—and you’re welcome to adapt it to your needs.
Let’s stop treating snapshots as “temporary” without actually managing them.
