I've two VMs created at the Compute Engine session with hourly snapshot as backup copies. I never created any storage bucket, I wonder where do those snapshots stored and how does it count for the storage space charges?
And, is there a way I can backup the VMs to on-prem storage? e.g. can I use any API command to download the VM snapshot to my local storage as a backup of backup just in case Google Cloud screwed up.
When you create a snapshot, you can specify a storage location. The location of a snapshot affects its availability and can incur networking costs when creating the snapshot or restoring it to a new disk. You will find the pricing for snapshot storage here.
This article describes how to create an image from your VM's root disk and export it to Google Cloud Storage or you can directly download it to your remote computer.
