Questions on snapshot billing

Hello. I have read https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/question-about-snapshot-pricing and understood that snapshots are not actually billed at the current moment, but I’d like to ask you the following questions before actual billing starts so that we the users can see the clear pricing plan for the snapshots on its official release.

1. Actual size of the snapshots When we take a snapshot, how much space does it actually take? Is it the whole size of the droplet from which the snapshot was made? (i.e. 20GB for $5/mo. plan.) Or it takes only the space used by existing files in the droplet? (i.e. around 1GB for the initial state) Is there any compression made when creating a snapshot? If so, do we get charged for size before or after the compression?

2. Displaying the size of snapshots (This is a request rather than a question.) Since there are a lot of ambiguity on the size of the snapshots that we are (or will be) actually billed for as shown above, it will be nice if you could display the size information on each snapshot (for billing purpose), so that we can anticipate the price and manage snapshots accordingly on our budget.

3. Price after distributing snapshot image to all regions Currently there is an option to distribute a snapshot image to all (three) regions of your servers. If we use this feature, will the price be tripled as well or stay the same? If the price will be tripled, will we be able to delete snapshot image from some data centers after distributing it to all regions?

4. Timing of the billing. In the url shown above, you indicated that we will be billed $0.02/GB every time a snapshot is created.

First of all, I’d like to clarify that is it $0.02/GB for all lifetime of the snapshot or is it actually $0.02/GB /mo. and you just make initial monthly charge (of $0.02GB) at the time of snapshot creation?

In either way, I think this timing of charging is very undesirable for the users, because it means we will be charged for every snapshot we make to keep track of incremental updates which might remain for very short amount of time (until a snapshot for the master version at some good stopping point is made.) It may not be a big deal if the image size is around a few GB or so, but when it gets around 100GB or more, it could make impact to some users.

I hope you will change this and billed us for some sort of average (daily or even hourly) usage of the snapshots for each month which won’t prohibit frequent creation of snapshots.

5. Billing for incremental snapshots (This is also more like a request rather than a question.) Currently, all the snapshots seem to be a full backup of the droplet where each snapshot was made. But, this wastes a lot of space because some of the snapshots we create only differ by small changes (could be less than a 10MB in file size.) It will be nice if we can make snapshot for incremental backup and use less space (thus less charges). Is there any plan for implementing such features?

That’s it! Thanks in advance.