Recall, a snapshot is like taking a picture of your VM at that exact time. You can then roll back to the snapshot as needed.
To take a snapshot in Proxmox do the following:
Select your VM
Navigate to Snapshots in the menu
Click "Take snapshot"
In the new window provide a name for your snap and add a descrption.
Click "Take Snapshot"
It is important to create backups for your VMs. Proxmox does this a bit differently then what we learned with in Type-2 Hypervisors.
To create a backup in Proxmox do the following:
Select your VM
Navigate toe Backup
Click "Backup now"
In the new window:
Select the location (Storage) to save the backup
Select the Mode:
Snapshot: Provides low downtime, but can have some inconsistency risk. This does a live backup of the running VM.
Suspend: This is provided for improving compatibility. This suspends the VM before taking a snapshot. This increases downtime due to suspending the VM. Not recommended.
Stop: Provides the highest level of consistency and compatibility. The VM is shutdown and then the VM is backed up. Once the backup process has started the VM can resume full operational mode again (if it was running when the backup process was started).
Select your compression (I recommend staying with ZSTD)
Complete the Notes section as needed.
Click "Backup"
Keep in mind that depending on where you saved the backup you might need to download it. You can use SFTP to connect to your Proxmox Server and download it or use scp on the Proxmox CLI to copy the file to a backup location.
In the video below I show how to create a Snapshot in Proxmox and how to backup your VM.