I think that snapshots are really only useful in two places. This is theoretical and from research in talking to people.

- Quick restore after upgrades/patches. Take one before making changes, make the changes, if you need to rollback, you can do it with the snapshot.

- Short term comparisons, for things like EOM/EOY work. Grab a view of the database for some point in time, perhaps 31st of the month or year, do work, compare backwards.

The problem with anything more than short term is that you have to delete the snapshot to restore the database or recover anything. IMHO, the biggest feature missing from SS2K5 in this area, is that we can't backup snapshots. Doesn't make sense to me. Let me stream out pages in a backup just like other databases, then I have the chance to recover the snapshot in a DR situation.