Les Mikesell wrote: > Clonezilla-live is a boot-from CD linux that will copy just the used > portions of the disk and can save to another disk or image files on > local disks or over the network. I'd recommend it over dd, but maybe > someone has a way to do LVM snapshots so the copy can be done without > a reboot. > i've generally used dump(8) and restore(8) to image ext2/3FS.... this can even be used to do an incremental dump although I rarely do that. while i've never tried this, in theory, if you're using LVM, you can snapshot a live filesystem, then dump the unmounted snapshot to get a clean image. note that snapshotting a database is a somewhat dicey proposition, however. I generally prefer to use the databases own dump facility rather than backing up its raw tablespace files (pg_dumpall for postgres, etc).