Creating a snapshot

You create a snapshot with the createSnapshotOperation interface in the Administration Web Service.

Before taking the snapshot, ensure that you have reviewed the list of restrictions.

To create a snapshot:

Run the client application that will invoke the Administration Web Service for the specific data store. For example, in SOAP UI, access the web service for the data store as follows:
```
http://localhost:<port>/ws/admin/DataStore?wsdl
```
Specify the path and the name, as shown in the following excerpt (the entire Web service request is not shown):
Optionally, if you want to send this request within an outer transaction, you can also specify an ID of the outer transaction using the outerTransactionId attribute.
```
<admin:createSnapshotOperation path="${snap_URI}" name="${snap_name}"/>
```
- snap_URI represents an absolute URI path to the file system location, and is located on the same file system as the data files for a particular data store. It should be of the format file:///localdisk/username/dir.
- snap_name represents the name of the snapshot.
The Web service returns a confirmation message if the snapshot was successfully captured.

After you capture the snapshot, copy it to a safe location using the archiving method of your choice. Deleting a snapshot does not affect the Dgraph process.