On 7/10/12, John R Pierce pierce@hogranch.com wrote:
IF you're using LVM, you can take a file system snapshot, and dump the snapshot, however, as this is a point-in-time replica of the file system.
Unfortunately I wasn't.
It does seem that essentially all the better methods that minimize downtime require the system to be prepped when first installed, be it LVM/MD/DRBD.
So going ahead, I'm basically making it a point to use MD mirror on all new installs, including VMs that are not running RAID 1 virtually as the physical storage is already RAIDed.
The assumption is that I should be able to just add an iSCSI target as a member of the degraded RAID mirror, wait for it to sync, then shutdown and start the new server within minutes as opposed to waiting a couple of hours for rsync or any other forms of imaging/dump to backup the current state.
The added benefit of this approach, it would seem is that I could use that same approach to do backup of the entire fs.