What is a Qdrant snapshot, and what two purposes does it commonly serve?

I think of a Qdrant snapshot as a point-in-time archive of a collection's data and configuration, including its stored points and pre-built index. In production it has two common uses: first, disaster recovery or rollback to a known-good state; second, moving or cloning a collection between environments without rebuilding the vector index from scratch. The second use is important on large collections because restoring a snapshot can avoid the expensive re-indexing phase. I would not treat a snapshot as the same thing as a full disaster-recovery strategy for every deployment: for Qdrant Cloud, full-cluster backups are a separate mechanism aimed at cluster failure recovery. A common misconception is that a collection snapshot automatically represents an entire distributed cluster; in a distributed setup, snapshots are node-specific for the collection, so recovery needs the appropriate snapshot set.