On a Pure Storage FlashArray, volume snapshots are immutable, read-only, point-in-time representations of your data. Because they cannot be attached directly to a host to be read or modified, you must use the Copy function to make the data usable.

The Purity operating environment allows you to copy a snapshot to two specific destinations:

A new volume: This effectively creates a clone. It provisions a brand-new, writable volume using the exact data footprint of the snapshot. This is incredibly useful for test/dev environments, offline reporting, or granular file recovery where you don ' t want to disrupt the original production volume.

An existing volume: This takes the data from the snapshot and completely overwrites the target volume. This is the standard procedure when you need to perform a full rollback of a corrupted volume, or when you want to quickly refresh a lower-level environment (like refreshing a QA database with yesterday ' s Production snapshot).

Here is why the other options are incorrect:

A new Snapshot (B & C): You cannot directly " copy " a snapshot to create another standalone snapshot. Snapshots are uniquely generated from active volumes. If you wanted to duplicate a snapshot ' s exact state, you would first copy it to a volume, and then take a new snapshot of that resulting volume.