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I'm currently tasked with bringing up a existing server to (at least more) professional standards - with as little disruption as possible to end-users. To have a proper rollback, I need to backup the existing server's root fs, which is currently ext4 inside a primary disk partition - not LVM, which would make the whole show a mere finger excercise. I'd like to avoid shutting down the server.

Is it even possible under these circumstances?

Roman
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2 Answers2

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You don't need LVM. LVM just uses the device mapper, too. You can do that yourself. That may be a bit tricky with the root fs, though, as you probably have to modify the boot scripts.

You just need to put a DM device on top of the root device, e.g.

sectors="$(blockdev --getsz /dev/sda3)"
dmsetup create rootfs --table "0 ${sectors} linear /dev/sda3 0"

Something like this has to be put into the initrd boot scripts. Instead of /dev/sda3 you would then mount /dev/mapper/rootfs to /. Then you can make snapshots of the root fs (but have to do all the steps by hand with dmsetup; no black magic though). You just can't merge them back but that should not be a problem.

Hauke Laging
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  • That is quite elegant. I'll read into that. Thanks. – Roman Feb 22 '13 at 13:53
  • If you manage to get your / mounted from /dev/mapper/rootfs (what IMHO every distro should do) then I can provide the code for snapshopt creation. I already do that: My LVs are exported to a KVM guest and appear there as regular disks. Thus I have to put DM devices on top of them. Not a big deal with non-root fs, though. – Hauke Laging Feb 22 '13 at 13:59
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    Could you also post the snapshot script please? – user128063 May 05 '17 at 13:54
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You can try BMR solution provided by bacula

Nehal Dattani
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