IOTA Roadmap: IOTA Will Implement Automated Snapshotting
For IOTA to suffice the needs of devices that will pervade and make up the Internet of Things, it has to use “Snapshotting”.
Snapshotting in IOTA is done to stop the Tangle from growing too much in size. This process keeps all the balances and removes all the transaction data and transaction history to start anew.
The balances that were saved will altogether serve as a new address or the genesis of the upcoming transactions. Generally, it keeps the databases on the devices to a very small size.
The snapshotting process is also similar to Blockchain pruning. Pruning is usually used in cryptos such as Nxt/Ardor wherein transasctions that are no longer needed are trimmed to prevent blockchain bloat and only keeps a hash of the file.
Snapshotting has more important advantage than of pruning because it groups various transfers to the same address into one record which will lead to a smaller storage demand generally.
IOTA provides an interactive and community-created developer tutorials here.
Makes sense. No need for every client to know the full transaction history of the currency. If they do need to see older history they could look into an older snapshot.
I wonder how often snapshots are going to happen? I guess it might chance as the network grows..
Good question. Considering the amount of devices in the IoT, I may have to say a LOT of snapshotting will happen as we approach mainstream implementation of IOTA. I also do not think this will be a problem when it comes to fetching these snapshots as due to the rapid rise in technology, the specs of computers today might be the specs of smart refrigerators tomorrow and internet speeds of establishments today might be the regular speeds of households in the near future.