Snapshots allow you to save region data and reload it later. A typical use case is loading data from one environment into another, such as capturing data from a production system and moving it into a smaller QA or development system.

In effect, you can load data from one distributed system into another distributed system. Administrators export a snapshot of a region or an entire cache (multiple regions) and later import the snapshot into another region or distributed system by using the RegionSnapshotService or CacheSnapshotService interface and the Region.getSnapshotService or Cache.getSnapshotService method.

The snapshot file is a binary file that contains all data from a particular region. The binary format contains serialized key/value pairs and supports PDX type registry to allow the deserialization of PDX data. The snapshot can be directly imported into a region or read entry-by-entry for further processing or transformation into other formats.