Hey Hazel,
Good to see you here!
Providing platform support for snapshotting and exporting is something that was discussed during the last ICP.Lab on Storage and Scalability, and is something that DFINITY wants as well.
Maybe @dsarlis or @ulan can give an update on the state of these features.
Just FYI:
There’s also the recently released dfx deps feature, which makes it easier to provide and download wasm modules related to canisters, and there are ecosystem projects like LightIC which provide alternative implementations to run canisters outside the IC.