Hello All, I have several questions about LVM snapshots. o Are snapshots persistent across reboots? If not by default, can they be made to be persistent? o How many snapshots can I have at once? o Is there some in-depth documentation out there on just the snapshot aspects of LVM? I spent about an hour googling for this info, but couldn't find what I needed. Why am I interested in this? Last year I took advantage of one of those occasional Tiger Direct ( shameless plug ;) deals to get myself a 200GB drive for 50 bucks. I am using the drive to backup my machines. Right now I backup once a month by copying the user data from my iBook, my wife's iMac, and my Knoppix laptop to the drive. Each time it comes to about 15GB total. I am beginning to fill the drive, so I want to design a more efficient way of using it with OSS tools. My plan is this: o Acquire a cheap used PIII pc. Install the 200GB drive and Centos (for familiarity's sake, RHEL is one of the distros I use at work) o Make an LVM partition on the drive. o Designate half the drive to data and half the drive to snapshot space. o Rsync every machine weekly. Prior to each rsync, snapshot the drive. o Keep as many snapshots as will fit. Presumably this will be many more "full" backups that I can hold than by just copying stuff to the drive outright. I am downloading Centos right now to test this scheme. I thought I would ask while I wait for bit torrent. Has anyone tried something similar to this? -Adam
Adam> o Are snapshots persistent across reboots? If not by default, can Adam> they be made to be persistent?
From what I know, LVM snapshots aren't that reliable, but I admit I haven't touched them lately.
Adam> o How many snapshots can I have at once? Bunches I think, but... Adam> Last year I took advantage of one of those occasional Tiger Adam> Direct ( shameless plug ;) deals to get myself a 200GB drive for Adam> 50 bucks. I am using the drive to backup my machines. Right Adam> now I backup once a month by copying the user data from my Adam> iBook, my wife's iMac, and my Knoppix laptop to the drive. Each Adam> time it comes to about 15GB total. I am beginning to fill the Adam> drive, so I want to design a more efficient way of using it with Adam> OSS tools. My plan is this: What some people do is use 'rbackup' which will only backup those files which actually change, and hardlink to the un-changed ones. This way each snapshot looks complete, but they're actually fairly compressed. http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/ And google for "rbackup rsync snapshot" and you'll get more hits. Adam> o Acquire a cheap used PIII pc. Install the 200GB drive and Centos Adam> (for familiarity's sake, RHEL is one of the distros I use at work) sounds good. I've been looking to setup a main home file/backup/mysql/http server type device with lots of disk. But I want it to be *quiet* so I can just leave it on all the time and not worry about noise bothering people. Unlike my current do everything box which is loud. One of the Via EPIC boards looks nice, if it could hold enough disks to make a good RAID5 setup with hotspare. John
participants (2)
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Adam Keck -
John Stoffel