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How To Perform a Bare-Metal Backup On Linux LVM

Posted by timothy on from the you-may-touch-only-the-heavy-atoms dept.

perlow writes "Using the free System Rescue CD you can perform bare-metal backups and restores of many types of computer systems. In this article, ZDNet columnist Jason Perlow explains the multi-step procedure in detail on an LVM-based system."

1 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Sure - Don't. by pla · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Step 1 - If your LVM hasn't forgotten its own configuration yet, get that sucker off an LVM as fast as you possibly can.

    When I first discovered LVM (and it had already reached a quite mature V2 at that point), I thought it the greatest thing in volume management since the invention of the RAID.

    I didn't half-ass it, I took my time to learn how it works, set up and broke a few, added a new PV and grew it to make sure it worked, backed some up, recovered from deliberately broken volumes (which works great - as long as you never try to bring the broken volume online by, say, rebooting), etc. Then I turned it on and loved it.

    Then I received a hard lesson in what it means to say that JBOD has a failure rate multiplicatively proportional to that of each individual drive. And, surprise surprise, LVM amounts to nothing more than fancy OS-level JBOD, without even the performance boost of a proper RAID controller.

    Thanks but no thanks. If I want to span a volume across multiple disks, I'll use RAID 5 or 6 from now on, ThankYouVeryMuch. I can only thank Zeus that I hadn't yet gotten around to cannibalizing my old file server when the LVM one day decided to eat itself (even if I could have salvaged something from the individual drives, I couldn't once it "fixed" its configuration to reflect the new PV set).