Shallow copy snapshots allow you to reference data from an entire remote-backed repository instead of storing all of the data from the segment in a snapshot repository. This makes accessing segment data faster than using normal snapshots because segment data is not stored in the snapshot repository.
Use the [Snapshot API]({{site.url}}{{site.baseurl}}/api-reference/snapshots/create-repository/) and set the `remote_store_index_shallow_copy` repository setting to `true` to enable shallow snapshot copies, as shown in the following example:
Once enabled, all requests using the [Snapshot API]({{site.url}}{{site.baseurl}}/api-reference/snapshots/index/) will remain the same for all snapshots. After the setting is enabled, we recommend not disabling the setting. Doing so could affect data durability.
## Considerations
Consider the following before using shallow copy snapshots:
- Shallow copy snapshots only work for remote-backed indexes.
- All nodes in the cluster must use OpenSearch 2.10 or later to take advantage of shallow copy snapshots.