There is no right or wrong way to accomplish what you are doing. The two types of workflows can essentially support both use cases, i.e. protection and repurposing.  The protection seems straightforward for you. The service plan can be utilized to keep any number of copies, ready to be utilized for restoring. The time to restore I cannot state, but from working with many other customers, AppSync has reduced those times significantly..all dependent upon the environment of course.  For the other use case, repurposing, you can utilize either type of workflow. I suggested service plans, due to the way your applications are laid out. If there are multiple applications within one CG, then you really do not have a choice, unless you can break them up at the storage layer. If you can create unique CGs per application/database, then the repurposing workflows are certainly more conducive for your purposes.  Utilizing the repurposing workflows will provide the ability to create 1st and 2nd gen copies. The 1st gen could also be utlized for a restore, so long as it is never mounted, and the 2nd gen copies happen near instantaneously, though the mount operations may take longer. The 2nd gen copies can be divvied out to the developers, who all will have a working copy of the 1st gen. This solution will only affect the application once. This is of course, as we have discussed, dependent upon the layout of the CGs, as the repurposing workflows perform copy management differently than the service plans.
Hey guys,  I'm a Database Developer trying to get a handle on Appsync so we can start using it with our XtremIO SAN, and take away some of the hassle from our overworked Sysadmin, who has been mounting Protect (Service Plan) copies, unmounting and complaining of having to manually unmapping and expiring the copies.  I'm trying to perform a regular repurpose copy for development, but I am finding when I perform a snapshot repurpose, that it says in the details:  The problem here is, although I am on the "User Databases" page of "Copy Management", I am selecting a single database, and I want to just repurpose that single database - and instead, this makes a g1 copy of all the databases on the server.  Is there something I'm doing wrong here - why is it choosing All Databases when I am after the one?  We're also finding that in the XtremIO utility, it is reporting the copy is the full size of the original - so, for a 50gb database, it'll report that an additional 50gb is used for each copy we make - eg 3 copies is 150gb on our XtremIO.  My understanding was that it was a point-in-time diffed copy and it would only accrue additional space as the two copies became different from each other?
Creating a Repurpose SQL snapshot on XtremIO - all databases