Snapshots Save

but you should still make Backups

Snapshots

A raid 1 protects your data against disk failure. It does not protect them against accidental user changes such as deletion or overwriting. Such protection can however be provided by snapshots.

Snapshots are a feature that is implemented by the kernels device mapper. They can be managed with the logical volume manager LVM2. They provide a frozen image of a block device without the costs (in time and space) of copying the device. This is achieved using COW (Copy On Write). Every block on the device is saved to a separate block device before it is written. This is used to reconstruct the original state through an appropriate block mapping.

/home Safety

The setup that is described is as follows. There is a raid1 device /dev/md1 that is fed into a LVM2 volume group volg1 as a physical volume. This provides a logical volume /dev/volg1/home that is mounted at /home.

A snapshot /dev/volg1/home.old of /dev/volg1/home is dropped and recreated at boot time. The snapshot is later mounted at /home.old. So everybody can easily restore the boot time state of his files.

Snapshot recreation is done from an init script. The critical line that creates the snapshot is

    lvcreate -l 19539 -c 512  -s -p r -n home.old /dev/volg1/home /dev/sdc1
    

Note that this uses /dev/hdc1 as the COW device. This is unfortunately an undocumented lvcreate parameter. It is only mentioned on the linux-lvm mailing list. Using a separate physical COW device reduces the write performance penalty of the snapshot. To do this /dev/sdc1 has to be a physical volume in the volg1 group:

    pvcreate /dev/sdc1
    vgextend volg1 /dev/sdc1
    

The rather large chunk size (-c 512) serves the same purpose. The writes are however still slowed down by a factor of approximately 6. Snapshots can be writeable, -p r turns this off. -l 19539 is the size of /dev/sdc1 in physical extends:

    enter:~# pvdisplay /dev/sdc1 | grep Total
      Total PE              19539
    

To make sure the additional lvcreate parameter has not been silently ignored we take a look at the device mapper table:

    enter:~# dmsetup table
    volg1-home.old-cow: 0 160063488 linear 8:33 384
    volg1-home: 0 1468006400 snapshot-origin 253:2
    volg1-home-real: 0 1468006400 linear 9:1 384
    volg1-home.old: 0 1468006400 snapshot 253:2 253:3 P 1024
    

The volg1-home.old-cow lines major:minor of 8:33 is the one from /dev/sdc1:

    enter:~# ls -l /dev/sdc1 
    brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 33 22. Mär 17:44 /dev/sdc1