On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 11:29:15AM -0600, Micah Anderson wrote: > I am trying to decide what the best way to deal with backups on a LVM > system is. backup like any other system. [cut] > 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). it is very easy, i do it all the time because the debian woody installer doesnt support a raided install. Read the software raid howto. Then read the LVM howto. Particular: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.4 http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.10 http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.11 http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.12 use method 2 Mark it failed After this, you either spend time doing this find . -xdev | cpio -pm /mnt/newroot which is a waste of time, since this is a LVM system http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/x546.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/x662.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/removeadisk.html So really, it is not a problem. If you want to, you can catch me at irc.oftc.net at #vserver, and i'll walk you through it. > 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). do both, both mirror and backup. > 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? I would either take filesystem backup, or the partition containing the LVM system. But... setting up a LVM system does not take long, so just do the filesystem on file level, not blocklevel. > 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? Snapshots MIGHT degrade your performance, but they are good if you run a database, then you can shut it down, take a snapshot and start it up again. JonB _______________________________________________ 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/
