Snapshots are a critical safety net for Postgres teams, but they can be slow and impractical when databases grow large. Restoring from a snapshot in AWS RDS can take 30 minutes to hours, even with point-in-time recovery, which adds additional time due to replaying WAL logs. This limits what you can do with your snapshots, such as inspecting historical data or testing changes before applying them to production. Additionally, restores require duplicate infrastructure, which can be a problem for large databases. However, Neon has implemented a better way to use snapshots, with an architecture that's faster and unlocks new workflows. In Neon, snapshots are point-in-time references to the state of a branch, captured instantly without performance impact, allowing for instant restoration into new branches, queryable data, and attached compute on demand. This enables fast recovery, lower overhead, more confidence, and better workflows for large Postgres databases.