[vox-tech] Cloning LVM volume over network

[timriley at appahost.com]

> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [vox-tech] Cloning LVM volume over network
> From: Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com>
> Date: Tue, May 29, 2012 10:50 am
> To: lugod's technical discussion forum <vox-tech at lists.lugod.org>
> 
> 
> On 05/27/2012 09:16 AM, Wes Hardaker wrote:
> > Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com> writes:
> > 
> >> I'm looking for the most efficient way to clone an LVM volume 50GB from
> >> one physical machine to another. Both machines must stay up, so that
> >> rules out clonezilla. I'd also like it to be more efficient that dd, so
> >> more similar to partimage or partclone where it skips the empty space
> >> and only copies the filled part.
> >>
> >> Anyone have examples that show how to do this?
> > 
> > I'd typically use rsync...  Fast and efficient :-)
> 
> I think I should clarify that my lvm volume is a virtual machine so I
> need to copy partition information too.
> 
> What I'm looking at right now is something like:
> dd if=/dev/vg_root/lv_zimbra bs=1k | ssh zen4 dd
> of=/dev/vg_root/lv_zimbra bs=1k

My general impression regarding backups is you can either
traverse the filesystem's directories or do an image dump.
Historically, these have been mutually exclusive. Of course,
dd (data-dump) is the later and will not know whether a block
belongs to a directory's file.

> 
> But I'd like to figure out the syntax to do that with partclone because
> it's more efficient than dd.

Backups also have progressed faster than I can keep up. Maybe there is
an image dump program that knows to check the filesystem's directory
to see if each block used. I found this page that might perform this
function.

http://partclone.org/usage_all.html
Press the <dd> link.

> 
> Thanks,
> Alex
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