The embodiments disclosed herein provide a flash aware snapshot technique for two-way data recovery and back-in-time execution. The disclosed snapshot technique is designed to reduce the number of write operations to improve the performance on flash-based storage systems. The disclosed snapshot technique can guarantee data recovery no matter which of the production site or the backup site fails. The disclosed snapshot technique can also reduce the storage space requirement for snapshots by exploiting content locality. Furthermore, the disclosed snapshot technique can be implemented using hardware, software, firmware, or any combination of them. In case of hardware implementation, only minor hardware modifications are needed.