Tintri snapshots and clones are operations on the VM itself (and just the VM!), and make very efficient use of data and metadata and impose very little, if any, performance overhead. This is achieved by sharing both data and metadata at a fine granularity and by designing the core data paths from the ground up to work efficiently with snapshots and clones. Snapshots and clones can be created instantaneously regardless of the size of the VM, and use no additional space until they are modified. Furthermore, because snapshots and clones can be created and managed on a per-VM basis, it gives the user more flexibility in managing the data protection policies for different VMs.