Back In Time

Backup after creating an LVM snapshot: what do you think?

Asked by Mauro

Backintime is great and I discovered that many ideas I had in mind were already implemented in newer versions (I was using an old one), like the SSH mode and full rsync mode! :-) Great work!

Now I was just wondering whether having the ability to create an LVM snapshot of the source before backing up could be an interesting feature, so that "exact" snapshots of the state of your files at a certain time could be stored (something like using Volume Shadow Copies in the Windows world).
Of course, this should be enabled only when source files are in an LVM volume and then the copy process should take source files from the snapshot rather than from the actual origin.

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Germar (germar) said : 		#1

I've no experience with LVM. But I think this could easily be done with user-callback script. Create a snapshot and mount it somewhere before backup starts and unmount it after backup has finished. BIT must run as root for this and include only the mountpoint of the LVM snapshot.

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Mauro (mauromol) said : 		#2

Yes, I thought about that. However some kind of built-in support might be desirable here. The first thing that comes into my mind is that if I include only the mount point in the backup source, the BIT main window shouldn't be able to show me the "current state" unless a (possibly recent) snapshot is currently mounted on that mount point.

Also a background service run as root to automatically create (before beginning) and remove (in the end) the LVM snapshot without asking me the root password whenever a scheduled backup starts would also be a nice thing.

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