> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ryft.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Snapshot Lifecycle

> Manage Iceberg snapshots end-to-end with automated expiration, daily and weekly recovery points, and safe restore. Control retention and storage growth.

Apache Iceberg tables maintain a complete history of changes via snapshots - each representing a consistent view of the table at a specific point in time. Snapshots enable time travel, rollback, and incremental processing, but without structured lifecycle management they quickly become expensive and difficult to manage.

**Snapshot Lifecycle** is Ryft’s unified framework for managing Iceberg snapshots end-to-end. It combines automated expiration, calendar-aware recovery points (daily / weekly snapshots), and a first-class restore experience - so you always have meaningful recovery points without unbounded storage growth.

Snapshot Lifecycle includes three tightly integrated capabilities:

* **Intelligent expiration** — Automatically removes snapshots that are no longer useful
* **Structured recovery points** — Preserves daily and weekly snapshots for reliable historical restores
* **Safe restore experience** — View and restore tables to recovery points with a single action

Together, these replace ad-hoc snapshot retention and rigid expiration policies with a reliable and predictable system.

<img className="block" src="https://mintcdn.com/ryft/L5DPwfzBtA5mdzde/images/snapshot_lifecycle.png?fit=max&auto=format&n=L5DPwfzBtA5mdzde&q=85&s=b649597e329a9438f958c07f92b60158" alt="Snapshot Lifecycle" width="1258" height="588" data-path="images/snapshot_lifecycle.png" />

## Configuring Snapshot Lifecycle

Snapshot Lifecycle manages snapshot cleanup and restore points using a single policy that balances short-term flexibility with longer-term recovery guarantees.

A policy can define:

* A minimum number of snapshots to always retain
* How long to keep **continuous snapshots** (recent, high-resolution history)
* Whether to keep **daily** and **weekly** recovery snapshots (longer-term restore points)

### Continuous snapshots (recent history)

Recent snapshots are retained continuously for a configurable window (for example, the last 12 hours or 3 days).

These are useful for debugging, fast iteration, and short-term rollbacks.

### Daily and weekly recovery snapshots

In addition to continuous retention, Snapshot Lifecycle can preserve structured recovery points over time, such as:

* One snapshot per day for a fixed number of days
* Optional weekly snapshots for longer-term recovery

These snapshots are automatically selected, tagged, and retained so meaningful restore points remain available even as high-frequency snapshots are expired.

### Expiration

Snapshots that do not fall into any active retention window - and are not required to satisfy minimum snapshot guarantees - are safely expired automatically. This keeps storage usage predictable while preserving the recovery points you care about.

## Configuration Modes

Snapshot Lifecycle supports two configuration approaches:

### Automatic (Recommended)

Ryft manages snapshot lifecycle end-to-end using safe defaults and observed table behavior.
This mode is recommended for most tables and requires no manual tuning.

### Custom

For tighter control, users can define explicit snapshot lifecycle rules, including:

* Retention windows for recent continuous snapshot retention
* Daily and weekly snapshot retention periods
* Minimum snapshots to retain

Custom settings can be useful for tables with specific compliance or recovery requirements.

## Considerations and Limitations

* Snapshot Lifecycle uses Iceberg-native snapshot tagging to mark and manage recovery snapshots (daily and weekly). These tags are visible and accessible through any query engine, while Ryft manages expiration and safe restoration.
* Some compute engines (for example, Amazon Data Firehose) do not currently support writing to Iceberg tables with tagged snapshots. For such engines, Snapshot Lifecycle should not be enabled.
* Daily and weekly snapshots are tagged only after the protected period has fully elapsed, based on UTC time.
* Daily and weekly snapshots follow wall-clock time rather than table activity. If a table has no updates during a configured retention window, the corresponding daily or weekly snapshots may be expired.
* Disabling Snapshot Lifecycle removes all lifecycle-managed recovery snapshots. If only a specific retention tier (daily or weekly) is disabled, only snapshots associated with that tier are expired.