[kwlug-disc] Partimage on a mounted partition.

[Chris Irwin]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 14:13, Joe Wennechuk
<youcanreachmehere at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Wouldn't this happen also by my current method using dd ?

Yes.

>> The easiest solution to this problem would be LVM. You can snapshot
>> the logical volume, fsck the snapshot, cleanly back it up, and remove
>> the snapshot. You can guarantee the backup is as the disk was at one
>> point, rather than a moving target over time.
>>
> I will look into this.. Is it hard to set up on a running system?

It is a pain to do it on an existing system, since you'd be reworking
your disk layout. I migrated our development machine at work from bare
partitions to LVM (it was the only machine that wasn't LVM). It took a
spare hard drive, a bootable USB key, and enough offline time to
dump/restore all the data.

I wouldn't recommend migrating a live system if you're not already
familiar with the tools, though. But definitely consider it for any
future machines. There's a reason LVM is used by default in RHEL, etc.

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/ch-lvm.html

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>