How to create and manage snapshots in KVM

Snapshots let you capture a VM’s state at a specific moment so you can roll back if something goes wrong (updates, risky changes, tests). In KVM with libvirt there are two main families: Internal snapshots: the snapshot content is stored inside the qcow2 file itself. They usually require the VM to be powered off and only work with qcow2 storage (not raw, LVM, etc.). External snapshots: they create separate overlay files (qcow2); these are the most used for hot snapshots (running VM). They allow more flexible flows and can be consolidated later (blockcommit). Additionally, a snapshot can be: