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Does the ext3 filesystem support snapshotting? If so, is can this be done with straight partitions with no LVM?

An example of "straight partitions" would be the following:

  1. /dev/sda1 /boot ext3
  2. /dev/sda2 / ext3
  3. /dev/sda3 swap
U85
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2 Answers2

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Unlike a number of modern file systems, Ext3 does not have native support for
snapshots - the ability to quickly capture the state of the filesystem at
arbitrary times, instead relying on less space-efficient volume level snapshots
provided by the Linux LVM. The Next3 file system is a modified version of Ext3
which offers snapshots support, yet retains compatibility to the EXT3 on-disk
format

Citation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext3#Lack_of_snapshots_support

Kendall
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I would recommend R1Soft Hot Copy for taking a point-in-time snapshot of a filesystem. Using this, you can take a clean snapshot without using LVM. It's pretty clean and should give you what you're asking for.

Philip Kearns
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ewwhite
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