The snapshots collection
The snapshots collection in the content collection of the Content Repository contains snapshots. This collection is dynamically created after the first snapshot is created.
This collection is organized by cycle, although it is unlikely you will ever see anything other than an authoring sub-collection. An additional localization sub-collection is created when a user takes a snapshot of a map in the Localization cycle. By default, a map in the Published cycle cannot be snapshotted, so you should never see a published sub-collection.
It is not possible to publish or localize an actual snapshot object. (When a snapshot is published, published content objects are created based on the pointers in the snapshot, but a published copy of the snapshot itself is not created).