[linux-lvm] 'snapshot' target still experimental :-(

[Dan Stromberg]

On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 10:37 -0600, Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
> I noticed that this is still the case... but I want to use it :-)
> 
> I need to set up simple snapshot/rsync backups of XFS filesystems, so 
> I'm wondering what the current thinking in the community is. Is it 
> reliable enough to trust not to crash my server or do other nasty things?
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> linux-lvm at redhat.com
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> read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

I've been doing my home backups via rsync to an xfs via cron, and using
rsync from whatever (mostly ext3 and UFS) to ext3 for one-off backups
prior to making large administrative changes to systems.  It seems to be
working well so far, and also seems to give a very nice combination of
single-file recovery ease and disaster recovery ease, which isn't
astonishingly common.

It just maintains a series of hardlink trees, so any time a file is
deleted or added, the actual disk usage increase is only due to the
changes.

And, every backup after the first is both a fullsave and an incremental
in a sense - but the network usage is far, far less than your typical
fullsave.

http://dcs.nac.uci.edu/~strombrg/Backup.remote.html