US Patent 9323760 Intelligent snapshot based backups

This disclosure relates to a method, article of manufacture, and apparatus for intelligently determining snapshot method during snapshot based backup. In some embodiments, this includes at a second time instance, calculating a data change rate since a first time instance, obtaining policies, wherein each of the policies specifies a backup method and one or more corresponding conditions, determining a snapshot method based on the data change rate and the policies, and performing a snapshot using the snapshot method.