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Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices?

From Arno Lehmann <al@its-lehmann.de>
Newsgroups linux.debian.user
Subject Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices?
Date 2026-05-11 14:30 +0200
Message-ID <MTxVM-4luO-7@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
References <MSbuh-3l9v-11@gated-at.bofh.it> <MTbLz-46bP-3@gated-at.bofh.it> <MTbLz-46bP-1@gated-at.bofh.it>
Organization IT-Service Arno Lehmann

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Hi all,

Am 10.05.2026 um 14:41 schrieb tomas@tuxteam.de:
> On Sun, May 10, 2026 at 01:54:10PM +0200, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Jochen Spieker wrote:
>>>> I was always under the impression that an LVM snapshot is not better
>>>> than an unclean filesystem, like for example after a power loss. But
>>>> this 20 year old document proved me wrong:
>>>> https://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshotintro.html
>>
>> tomas@tuxteam.de:
>>> Is there any reference for that? AFAIK LVM doesn't "know" about the
>>> underlying file system (if there is any).
>> In a later mail:
>>> This sounds very hypothetical: how should LVM that there is a file
>>> system /at all/ on the logical volume being snapshotted? How that
>>> this file system is mounted?
>>
>> Obviously one can inquire the list of mounted filesystems and their
>> storage devices [...]
> 
> ...then fsfreeze
> 
> Woah, Thomas: you definitely rock :)
> 
> Just what we all needed.

Do we? On one of my debian systems, man fsfreeze gets me

DESCRIPTION
        fsfreeze suspends or resumes access to a filesystem.

        fsfreeze  halts any new access to the filesystem and creates a
        stable image on disk.  fsfreeze is intended to be used with
        hardware RAID devices that support the creation of snapshots.

        fsfreeze is unnecessary for device-mapper devices.  The device-
        mapper (and LVM) automatically freezes a filesystem on the device
        when a snapshot creation is requested.  For more details see the
        dmsetup(8) man page.

Although LVM is rather limited in its support for snapshots, and XFS 
being somewhat paranoid (which is good for file systems) make this 
challenging in many cases.

Because, to get back to the original topic -- an LVM snapshot is *not* 
an exact copy of the original volume, and of course much less so of the 
partition, disk, or anything else. So a block level dump of an LVM 
snapshot is not something you can just dump back as a disaster recovery 
step.

And. of course, it doesn't let gaps between block storage consistency, 
file system consistency, file system "cleanness", file contents 
consistency and application data consistency vanish.

Cheers,

Arno

> Thank you (and for all your other insightful
> posts here!)

> Cheers

-- 
Arno Lehmann

IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück

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Thread

Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Hans <hans.ullrich@mail.de> - 2026-05-07 10:50 +0200
  Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Geert Stappers <stappers@stappers.nl> - 2026-05-07 11:00 +0200
    Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Hans <hans.ullrich@mail.de> - 2026-05-07 11:40 +0200
  Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-07 12:40 +0200
    Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Tim Woodall <debianuser@woodall.me.uk> - 2026-05-10 12:50 +0200
  Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Joe <joe@jretrading.com> - 2026-05-07 12:40 +0200
    Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-07 12:50 +0200
      Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Jochen Spieker <ml@well-adjusted.de> - 2026-05-07 15:10 +0200
        Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-07 15:30 +0200
          Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Jochen Spieker <ml@well-adjusted.de> - 2026-05-07 16:10 +0200
        Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-05-07 16:00 +0200
          Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Jochen Spieker <ml@well-adjusted.de> - 2026-05-07 16:10 +0200
            Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-05-07 18:00 +0200
              Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-07 19:00 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Joe <joe@jretrading.com> - 2026-05-07 20:00 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-07 20:20 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-10 14:50 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Arno Lehmann <al@its-lehmann.de> - 2026-05-11 14:30 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-11 15:00 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-05-11 17:50 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Arno Lehmann <al@its-lehmann.de> - 2026-05-11 18:30 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-11 18:40 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-05-11 22:00 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-11 18:30 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2026-05-11 19:50 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Arno Lehmann <al@its-lehmann.de> - 2026-05-11 22:00 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-12 08:00 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2026-05-12 13:40 +0200
                Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> - 2026-05-07 21:10 +0200
  Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Arno Lehmann <al@its-lehmann.de> - 2026-05-07 13:10 +0200
    Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Hans <hans.ullrich@mail.de> - 2026-05-07 13:40 +0200
    Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Hans <hans.ullrich@mail.de> - 2026-05-07 13:40 +0200
      Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Charles Curley <charlescurley@charlescurley.com> - 2026-05-07 15:50 +0200
        Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? <tomas@tuxteam.de> - 2026-05-07 16:20 +0200
        Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? "Roy J. Tellason, Sr." <roy@rtellason.com> - 2026-05-07 20:30 +0200
      Re: Debian tool for creating drive images from mounted devices? Andy Smith <andy@strugglers.net> - 2026-05-07 18:30 +0200

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