Creating a Snapshot

A snapshot is a single Arweave transaction, tagged Entity-Type: snapshot, Drive-Id, Block-Start, and Block-End, whose body is a JSON index of every ArFS entity metadata transaction (drive, folder, and file revisions) mined for that drive across the block range it covers. It exists purely as a read-path optimization: a client that wants to list a drive's full entity history can read the snapshot's JSON body directly instead of paginating through and re-fetching every individual metadata transaction the drive has ever produced. create-snapshot builds this snapshot for you and posts it to Arweave.

Some important things to know:

• Costs to post, like any other data transaction. For a drive with a long entity history the snapshot body can be large, so posting it is not free -- create-snapshot estimates the cost up front, asserts your wallet can cover it, and prints the cost before sending.
• When to use it. Snapshotting is most useful for drives with a large number of files/folders/revisions, where clients that support snapshot-accelerated listing would otherwise have to replay a long transaction history on every listing. It's a maintenance operation you run occasionally (e.g. periodically, or before publishing a drive expected to see heavy read traffic) -- not something every drive needs.
• Public drives only (for now). Private drive snapshots are not yet supported.
• Idempotent-ish, not automatic. Each run creates a NEW snapshot transaction covering the drive's entity history at that point in time; it does not update or replace a previous snapshot.

ardrive create-snapshot --drive-id "bc9af866-6421-40f1-ac89-202bddb5c487" -w "/path/to/wallet"

Use --dry-run to see the block range, entity count, byte size, and estimated cost without posting anything:

ardrive create-snapshot --drive-id "bc9af866-6421-40f1-ac89-202bddb5c487" -w "/path/to/wallet" --dry-run

Like other write commands, create-snapshot supports --boost, --turbo/--turbo-url, and --gateway. See ardrive create-snapshot --help for the full flag list.