Since I’ve been blogging a lot lately about data protection and resilience, it’s time to go beyond traditional snapshots and talk about something more powerful: Snap-to-Object.

Enterprise-grade snapshots are nothing new. NeuralMesh by WEKA supports them natively, allowing users to create fast, scalable, and space-efficient point-in-time copies for recovery, testing, and rollback. They’re an essential part of any robust data infrastructure.

But when your data protection strategy needs to go further—across time zones, across clouds, or across the air gap—you need something special.

That’s where Snap-to-Object comes in.

What Is Snap-to-Object?

Snap-to-Object (often, to my chagrin, abbreviated S2O) is a powerful capability in NeuralMesh that allows you to export a full filesystem snapshot, including both data and metadata, directly to object storage, such as Amazon S3.

Unlike automatic tiering, which transparently moves cold data to object over time, Snap-to-Object creates a complete, consistent, point-in-time image of your data. That image can be stored, transported, and restored on-demand.

How It Works

• The first time you invoke Snap-to-Object, NeuralMesh writes the entire snapshot to the target object store on premises or in a cloud.
• All future operations are incremental, transmitting only data that has changed since the last Snap-to-Object event. This makes recurring snapshots efficient and scalable.
• Data is stored in a WEKA-internal format optimized for integrity and consistency. It can’t be browsed outside of NeuralMesh but is fully restorable to any NeralMesh cluster..

Key Use Cases for Snap-to-Object

Backup and Archive
Regularly snapshot your NeuralMesh filesystems and export them to cloud or on-prem object storage. This provides a cost-effective, scalable, and policy-driven approach to long-term data retention.

Cross-Site Disaster Recovery
Use Snap-to-Object to protect against site failure by sending snapshots to remote object storage. You can later mount and restore them on a different NeuralMesh cluster—without needing third-party backup software or hardware replication.

Air-Gapped and Immutable Protection
Exporting snapshots to object storage with WORM (Write Once Read Many) or Object Lock configurations ensures that data remains tamper-proof, even if the source environment is compromised. Deleted snapshots in NeuralMesh can still be recovered from object—making S2O an effective ransomware and insider threat countermeasure.

Mount Anywhere
Snapshots exported via Snap-to-Object can be restored by creating a new filesystem on any NeuralMesh cluster. While restoring into an existing filesystem isn’t currently supported, this flexibility makes it easy to test, fork, or recover datasets in any region or environment.

Built for Security and Efficiency

Snap-to-Object integrates seamlessly with existing encryption and key management setups. If you’ve encrypted your NeuralMesh filesystems with KMS, your exported snapshots remain protected—and can only be restored with the proper keys.

Data uploads and downloads can be managed via the CLI or GUI, with options for full or incremental synchronization. Snapshots can also be stored in low-cost object tiers like AWS Glacier with instant retrieval, reducing cost without sacrificing accessibility.

Final Thoughts

Traditional snapshots are great for rollback and recovery. But Snap-to-Object expands that model into something far more powerful—a flexible, efficient, and secure way to export, store, and restore AI-scale data across any location.

It’s not just a backup. It’s portable infrastructure resilience.

Read How NeuralMesh Delivers Resilience at Scale