For IOTA to suffice the needs of devices that will pervade and make up the Internet of Things, it has to use “Snapshotting”.
Snapshotting in IOTA is done to stop the Tangle from growing too much in size. This process keeps all the balances and removes all the transaction data and transaction history to start anew.
The balances that were saved will altogether serve as a new address or the genesis of the upcoming transactions. Generally, it keeps the databases on the devices to a very small size.
The snapshotting process is also similar to Blockchain pruning. Pruning is usually used in cryptos such as Nxt/Ardor wherein transasctions that are no longer needed are trimmed to prevent blockchain bloat and only keeps a hash of the file.
Snapshotting has more important advantage than of pruning because it groups various transfers to the same address into one record which will lead to a smaller storage demand generally.
IOTA provides an interactive and community-created developer tutorials here.
