I am trying to decide what the best way to deal with backups on a LVM system is. I've got one 120gig disk that the system is riding on, 110gigs of that is setup on a LVM partition as such: Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/sympavg01/spool 511980 101640 410340 20% /home/sympa/spool /dev/sympavg01/archives 27503796 15009052 12494744 55% /home/sympa/archives /dev/sympavg01/expl 6291260 3758112 2533148 60% /home/sympa/expl The rest is partitioned up into separate /, /boot, /tmp, /usr, /var, and home (and swap). I don't like a machine that is dependant on one disk any more than the next guy, so I put another 120gig disk in the machine, thinking I would raid the two together. After reading months of list archives, I am seeing that building a raid array on the system at this point is not going to be straightforward, especially since the machine is in production. It seems the best method for doing this would be to build up md raid devices, layer LVM on top of the md's and then create filesystems, this isn't easy if you already have things up and running (although I am interested to hear if people have done this, and if so, how). In addtion, I feel as if backup up the system is a higher priority than having disk redundancy (mirrored corrupt data is worse for my situation than a disk failure and recovery time). It is simple for me to take a disk backup of the non LVM partitions (I use StoreBackup), but I am somewhat puzzled about the best direction to go with the LVM volumes. Should I back them up just like any other partition and not let the LVM bother me? What about the LVM metadata and if I needed to restore from this backup? Would taking snapshots be more advisable? The data in these partitions changes fairly raipidly. If I were to do snapshots, does it make sense to make the snapshot onto my backup disk (hdc) and then back up that snapshot onto the backup disk (hdc again), and then destroy the snapshot? Or is it a waste to snapshot to a different disk entirely, should I instead keep the snapshot to the same volume it is on? Or does it not matter at all because snapshots don't actually do much disk work until you start accessing the data? Thanks for any insights! micah _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
