On 01/13/2013 12:30 AM, Gordon Messmer wrote: > If you want to make a backup that's consistent across a filesystem, you > need to make a snapshot, mount it, and back up the snapshot content. If > there are files open for writing, you need to make them consistent while > the snapshot is made. While I rarely say nice things about Windows, > this is an area where Linux falls far short. There is no common > mechanism for making files and databases consistent and making a > snapshot for backups. Admins must do this on their own. If you aren't > actively taking steps to make your backups consistent, they aren't. After publicly bitching about Linux's poor backup infrastructure for the hundredth time, I decided to write a system largely similar to VSS. I've written the first iteration in bash. It took one day to do most of the work, and then a few hours of testing and fixing to get things working reasonably well. https://bitbucket.org/gordonmessmer/dragonsdawn-snapshot At this point, there's enough working for other people to start looking at. Systems with ext3/4 filesystems on LVM are supported. btrfs will follow. PostgreSQL has a script to make its data consistent, but other common systems like MySQL, OpenLDAP, and 389 DS need similar support. Documentation needs to be written. A few architectural issues need to be ironed out. If you're interested in improving the state of backups on GNU/Linux, please have a look and contact me if you want to help with code, testing, documentation, packaging, or maintaining packages in distributions so that this becomes a standard feature.