Backups with LVM -
Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is, to quote from the LVM Howto:
"a system which provides a higher-level view of the disk storage on a computer system than the traditional view of disks and partitions. This gives the system administrator much more flexibility in allocating storage to applications and users.
Storage volumes created under the control of the logical volume manager can be resized and moved around almost at will, although this may need some upgrading of file system tools.
The logical volume manager also allows management of storage volumes in user-defined groups, allowing the system administrator to deal with sensibly named volume groups such as "development" and "sales" rather than physical disk names such as "sda" and "sdb". "
Basically, it lets you do awesome things like combining multiple disks into one massive partition, extend partitions on the fly, add or remove disks from the system without disturbing filesystems, and even creating snapshots of the filesystem.
The beauty of snapshots is that they don't create a complete copy of the filesystem, only blocks which change. This means that it's fast and doesn't use much space if only a few files have changed.
I plan to use snapshots to take online MySQL backups, as well as backup 200GB of files on a server which needs to be backed up 4 times daily.
-Jonesy
Logical Volume Manager (LVM) is, to quote from the LVM Howto:
"a system which provides a higher-level view of the disk storage on a computer system than the traditional view of disks and partitions. This gives the system administrator much more flexibility in allocating storage to applications and users.
Storage volumes created under the control of the logical volume manager can be resized and moved around almost at will, although this may need some upgrading of file system tools.
The logical volume manager also allows management of storage volumes in user-defined groups, allowing the system administrator to deal with sensibly named volume groups such as "development" and "sales" rather than physical disk names such as "sda" and "sdb". "
Basically, it lets you do awesome things like combining multiple disks into one massive partition, extend partitions on the fly, add or remove disks from the system without disturbing filesystems, and even creating snapshots of the filesystem.
The beauty of snapshots is that they don't create a complete copy of the filesystem, only blocks which change. This means that it's fast and doesn't use much space if only a few files have changed.
I plan to use snapshots to take online MySQL backups, as well as backup 200GB of files on a server which needs to be backed up 4 times daily.
-Jonesy