On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 12:07 -0700, John R Pierce wrote: ><snip> > 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. ?? I've not done it for awhile, but I believe that the snapshot is taken with the snapshot volume (the LVM snapshot volume, that is) mounted. I've still got some scripts lying around that do this. The LVM snapshot volume is not a complete snapshot. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If you meant the *resulting* snapshot produced by using the snapshot facilities, I apologize for wasting your time and bandwidth. > > 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). > <snip sig stuff> -- Bill