Hi team, I am pretty new into distributed storage world and learning ceph day by day. I run a openstack hypervisor with ceph as backend block device.. There is a need to backup the instances running inside openstack. I have explored an option of creating COW incremental snapshots on ceph for rbd objects and revert to it whenever something broke.. The snaps that are created in the ceph gets stored in ceph storage itself which makes it as a single point of failure. Now i need to know if there is any possibility to explicitly specify a location for the snapshot as to where it should be saved. Consider storing the snapshot alone on a separate server which has its own internal disks to eliminate single point of failure and reverting from it on the ceph storage cluster. Something like below to store only the layered image snap outside of ceph to a server to less consume the storage..?? $ rbd snap add (pool name)/(image name)@(snap name) user@10.x.x.x:/data I know that we can use the below command to store the current rbd image state and export it completely as independent image not as a layered snapshot which will take up exact space of the base rbd object. $ rbd -p (pool name) export (rbd image name)@(snap name) (local file name) Once its done and the image is stored outside can a snap revert be triggered from this whole image on ceph? While i agree that ceph as a distributed storage device is not designed basically to do a backup solutioning, i just need to know the possibilities of rbd image layering.. Any comments on my above questions is greatly appretiated.. Regards, Prasanna, Ceph-user.