Back up a Compute Engine instance daily, retain backups for 30 days, and minimize management overhead and services. What should you do?

Creating a Snapshot Schedule directly on the Compute Engine disk is the most efficient and low-overhead solution. This built-in Compute Engine feature automates daily snapshot creation and manages retention policies (auto-deletion after 30 days) without requiring additional services or custom code. Adding snapshot schedule and retention metadata to the instance is incorrect because the schedule is applied to the disk, not the instance metadata. Cloud Functions with Cloud Scheduler would work but introduces more management overhead and cost compared to the native snapshot schedule. Using a bash script to copy to Cloud Storage is also possible but is a manual, less robust, and more complex solution than using native snapshots, and it doesn't create disk snapshots.