Re: Snapshot Program
> On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 04:21:47PM +0000, Hélder Pinheiro wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Is there any program to do a kind of snapshots of my debian
>> installation?
>> Something that I can restore through CLI
>> I am always playing around with my distro and sometimes things do not run
>> well, and I feed the need to restore a yesterday's image.
>> Is it possible?
>> Regards,
>> Hélder Pinheiro
> Hi,
> I'm using Clonezilla for that.
> www.clonezilla.org/
> Just capture a snapshot of system partition and you can restore it. It's
a live distro.
[LVM blurb]
As a permanent solution, consider installing the system in an LVM (Debian
supports this mode of installation), which supports an operation called
"snapshot". Leave some space in the "volume group" so that you can take a
read/write snapshot of the "logical volumes" (LVM equivalent to
partitions) before the modification of the system. Snapshots are "copy on
write", which means that they are created very fast and you need spare
space in the "volume group" only to accommodate the modifications of the
filesystem while the system is running.
The snapshots are created online, while the system live and running, and
there is a graphical interface system-config-lvm (which I don't use)
alongside the command line tools. The logical volumes can be resized
without the constraints of the partition table.
After you made the modifications, if you want to restore the previous
state, just delete the modified logical volumes and rename the snapshots
so they take place of the original logical volumes.
There is a lot of hope in the upcoming btrfs filesystem that will
implement all these features within the filesystem, but LVM is already a
mature and reliable tool.
João Luis
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