If your environment includes multiple back ends, you can also migrate volumes between these back ends. This is useful if you need to take a back end offline for maintenance. Backups are typically stored in a storage back end separate from their source volumes to help protect the data. This is not possible with snapshots because snapshots are dependent on their source volumes.

The Block Storage service also supports the creation of consistency groups to group volumes together for simultaneous snapshot creation. This provides a greater level of data consistency across multiple volumes.

The Object Storage service (swift) provides no built-in backup features. You must perform all backups at the file system or node level. However, the Object Storage service features robust redundancy and fault tolerance. Even the most basic deployment of the Object Storage service replicates objects multiple times. You can use failover features such as device mapper multipathing (DM Multipath) to enhance redundancy.

The Shared File Systems service (manila) provides no built-in backup features for shares, but you can create snapshots for cloning and restoration.