Can I use snapshots for this?

Hi,

I'm sorry, if this whould haven been obvious by simply triing, but I did can not remember to read anything in the docs:

I'm currently running a small 20GB RAID array and allow my users a simple versioning by storing a copy of all files one an IDE drive in the system every night at 4:00.

As 20GB are very small, we'll get a 180GB RAID in the next month. Unfortunately there is no cheep 180GB ide drive do have this way of verioning :-(.

But I thought about using LVMs snapshoots for this. Can I do so?

Thanks,
Goetz.

Hi Goetz,

You can indeed use snapshots for this. Basically what you need to do is create a snapshot each night at 4:00 of your /whatever lvol (e.g. /home). Then mount that snapshot as /nightly. Through that mountpointm your users will see the status of the /whatever file system (including file presence and contents) as it was when the snapshot was created! Because the snapshot feature saves only the updates content from the original logical volume, you need allocate only a fraction of the space of the original lvol to the snapshot. It depends on the update rate, but typically only 10%.

++Jos

P.S. Don't forget to umount and remove the old snapshot in your nightly
procedures...

And thus it came to pass that Goetz Bock wrote:
(on Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 04:37:01PM +0200 to be exact)

assert(heaven.isMissing(anAngel));