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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
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Ooooh I want to do this too. +1 – Tim Jan 27 '12 at 19:29

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote 
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

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up vote 2 down vote

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.

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That looks pretty neat, I'll have to try that out. – Zoredache Jan 27 '12 at 20:01

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