Cloud cost
Time Travel & Fail-safe
Two Snowflake mechanisms that keep changed or deleted data recoverable, and keep billing storage for it: Time Travel for a configurable window, Fail-safe for a fixed 7 days after that.
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Definition
Deleting a row or dropping a table doesn't immediately free the storage it used. Time Travel keeps the prior state recoverable for a retention window you configure (1 day fixed on Standard Edition, up to 90 on Enterprise), and once that window ends, Fail-safe holds it for a further, non-configurable 7 days on permanent tables.
Both windows bill storage the whole time they're active. A table with a lot of daily churn, like one truncated and reloaded every night, can carry a lot more retained-version storage than its live row count suggests.
Where it shows up
Time Travel's retention window is set per table or per account in Snowflake's own configuration, from a fixed one day on Standard Edition up to 90 days on Enterprise Edition. Fail-safe follows automatically once that window ends, for a further seven days on permanent tables, with no configuration option to change it.
What makes it expensive
A table truncated and reloaded every night carries far more storage than its live row count implies. Each day's discarded version stays billable through the Time Travel window and the Fail-safe week behind it. A table that never grows can still have storage that does, and the row count you would check first says nothing about it.
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