Snowflake Time Travel and Fail-safe preserve historical data, but the retained data occupies storage and contributes to storage charges.
Time Travel lets users query, clone, and restore changed or deleted data during the retention period. The standard retention period is 1 day. Enterprise Edition supports retention of up to 90 days for permanent databases, schemas, and tables.
The DATA_RETENTION_TIME_IN_DAYS parameter sets retention for an object. A value of 0 removes the retention period for newly created objects at that level. Reducing retention does not immediately erase all historical data; data that leaves Time Travel can move into Fail-safe.
Fail-safe provides a 7-day recovery period after Time Travel ends. It is intended for Snowflake-managed disaster recovery, not routine querying or user restoration. Fail-safe data cannot be queried or cloned by users.
Both features can increase storage beyond the current table data. The amount depends on changed and deleted data, retention settings, and the time those historical versions remain available.
Review storage usage for tables with high update or delete volume and compare it with retention settings. Permanent tables carry Fail-safe storage; transient and temporary tables do not carry a Fail-safe period. Storage is billed separately from warehouse compute.
Snowflake documents Time Travel and Fail-safe and Time Travel retention.