* Jesper Holm Olsen ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [010428 08:47]:
>
> At 08:50 28-04-01 -0500, you wrote:
>
> >I've seen ads for the commercial and pricey backup packages from
> >Syncsoft, Veritas and so on which claim no problems with live backups
> >on *nix or NT. I suppose they have some way of write-locking files,
> >copy to memory, then releasing the lock, but how could these utils
> >work at the block rather than file level?
>
> Veritas file-system (VxFS) can make what they call a 'snapshot' of a file
> system. The idea is to take a "snapshot" of a filesystem and mount it as
> readonly on another device. Whenever a block on the original filesystem is
> altered the old one is copied to the snapshot and thus keeping this in the
> state it was in when mounted. This is for example used to backup using
> vxdump. Unfortunatly this is not yet available on Linux as far as I know -
> only Solaris and HPUX :(
>
> A quick search on google revails that someone is working on this feature
> for Linux as well: http://lwn.net/2001/0308/a/snapfs.php3
Linux LVM supports snapshots. It's in 2.4 kernels, although it needs some
patching to make it usable.
Best,
--
Patrick Michael Kane
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
