Creating and managing file clones

A file clone is a writable snapshot of an individual file. File clones can be used to provision virtual machines by creating a virtual disk for each machine by cloning a common base image. A related usage is to clone the virtual disk image of an individual machine as part of taking a snapshot of the machine state.

Cloning a file is similar to creating a copy of a file, but the creation process is faster and more space efficient because no additional disk space is consumed until the clone or the original file is modified. Multiple clones of the same file can be created with no additional space overhead. You can also create clones of clones.