Does snapshot size is less than actual disk size even disk is full in google cloud?

Question

I have one disk with a size of 400GB which is full of data. when I take a snapshot of that disk on GCP, it shows only 280GB. is it normal?

Answer 1

Yes, it is normal, from documentation: Snapshots are incremental and automatically compressed, so you can create regular snapshots on a persistent disk faster and at a much lower cost than if you regularly created a full image of the disk..

You can test the snapshot, create a VM based on it and the VM must be working exactly as the one from which you create the snapshot.