The way Snowflake Zero Copy Cloning works is based on Snowflake's Micro-partition technology. So one of the nice things the snowflake data cloud does is that a CLONE at first is ONLY related to very very tiny metadata changes. Since snowflake has these immutable micro-partions a CLONE object at first is just a new reference to the micro-partitions at the EXACT time of the clone statement execution. So, if you NEVER ever change the clone than there are no additional storage costs for it. Also, a CREATE TABLE statement with a CLONE statement does not use Snowflake compute and has no compute costs. [unless in a somewhat rare case your usage of services like this exceeds Snowflake's 10% rule. See this:
Frank Bell Answered question August 21, 2022
