[Discuss] Backing up LVM partitions using snapshots

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey)]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Jerry Feldman
> 
> I have always preferred a file-oriented backup approach, but I have also
> been burned. I used to build tarballs until my backup of my home directory
> placed a VM in the tarball on a 32-bit Linux, and the drive where my home
> drive was crashed. I was able to restore everything up to the VM that was
> larger than 3GB. Eventually, I paid to extract the data from the hard
drive
> because the I lost my email archives and checkbook.
> 
> With today's larger HDs and/or inexpensive NAS systems, like the WD
> MyBook, you can use rsync's --link-dest so you can have the equivalent of

In my situation, I have millions of files which are mostly static.  So
simply walking the filesystem to find which files changed is the big time
consumer.  We were formerly backing this up via rsync, and it ran 10-12
hours per night.  Then we switched to ZFS and now the incremental takes
typically 7 minutes.  Mark's LVM snapshots should be able to achieve similar
results on this particular dataset.