On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:
Yes. To be more pedantic, the COW has copies of the original contents
of blocks written to the origin since the snapshot. That is why you
need to clear it to achieve your stated purpose. The origin blocks
are written normally to the *-real volume (you can see these in
the /dev/mapper directory).
But didn't you say that there is only one copy of the files stored physically
on disk?
Yes. When you make the snapshot, there is only one copy, and the COW table
is empty. AS YOU WRITE to the origin, each chunk written is saved to
*-cow first before being written to *-real.