You need to back up a 500 GB Persistent Disk attached to a Compute Engine instance. The disk contains a highly active database. You want to minimize the time the database is locked during the backup process. What is the most efficient way to take the backup?

Persistent Disk snapshots are the standard way to back up disks in GCP. They are incremental and asynchronous. To ensure application consistency for a database, you flush the buffers to disk (e.g., `FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK` in MySQL), issue the GCP snapshot API call, and immediately unlock the database. The snapshot continues in the background without impacting disk performance.