Understand: Snapshots

Azure supports manually creation of snapshots of Azure VMs that are added to an existing backup job. The snapshots you can view in the Azure snaphost view, which are used for CBT (change-block-tracking), are needed to perform incremental backups.Each snapshot is saved to the same Azure region where the protected Azure VM reside. They are necessary to the functionality of Azure backup

Important - Anycloud Backup for Azure does not include any snapshots created manually within the backup chain and does not apply the configured retention policy settings to these snapshots. This means that the snapshots are kept within the tenants Microsoft Azure environment until removed manually.

They can be disabled for weekly and full backup policies because full backups are performed every time. This will decrease the number of snapshots, but they must remain within the Azure subscription, as they are crucial to the service, as changes to the backup are part of the performing the newest backup.