ext3 Snapshot Support

Question

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

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.