What is disk cost of a powered-down snapshot ?

Do snapshots eat up substantial disk space? The files contained in the Snapshots folder in a VMs package contents seem surprisingly small at only 10-20K bytes. How can this store a VM's state? Is it just a pointer into the huge hdd file?

Background

I am a software developer. I take a lot of snapshots of the powered-down VM after installation. When something goes wrong I can revert back. I can also branch-off from an earlier snapshot for starting new software development work that might require different tools.

Example snapshots:
  1. Installed Parallels Tools, Windows updates, activated Windows
  2. Installed VS2010
  3. Installed VS2012
  4. Installed LabVIEW

Thanks in advance,

-Ed
 
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