[linux-lvm] Snapshots and disk re-use
Jonathan Tripathy
jonnyt at abpni.co.uk
Thu Feb 24 16:41:59 UTC 2011
On 24/02/11 15:20, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:
>
> On 24/02/11 15:13, Stuart D. Gathman wrote:
>> On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Jonathan Tripathy wrote:
>>
>>>> Yes. To be more pedantic, the COW has copies of the original contents
>>>> of blocks written to the origin since the snapshot. That is why you
>>>> need to clear it to achieve your stated purpose. The origin blocks
>>>> are written normally to the *-real volume (you can see these in
>>>> the /dev/mapper directory).
>>> But didn't you say that there is only one copy of the files stored
>>> physically
>>> on disk?
>> Yes. When you make the snapshot, there is only one copy, and the COW
>> table
>> is empty. AS YOU WRITE to the origin, each chunk written is saved to
>> *-cow first before being written to *-real.
> Got ya. So data that is being written to the origin, while the
> snapshot exists, is the data that may leak, as it's saved to the COW
> first, then copied over to real.
>
> Hopefully an expert will let me know weather its safe to zero the COW
> after I’ve finished with the snapshot.
>
>
Oh, I forgot to mention. My LVM sits on top of linux software RAID1.
Does that complicate things at all?
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