Chapter 9

Administering volume snapshots

Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) provides the capability for taking an image of a volume at a given point in time. Such an image is referred to as a volume snapshot. You can also take a snapshot of a volume set as described in Creating instant snapshots of volume sets” on page 334.

Volume snapshots allow you to make backup copies of your volumes online with minimal interruption to users. You can then use the backup copies to restore data that has been lost due to disk failure, software errors or human mistakes, or to create replica volumes for the purposes of report generation, application development, or testing.

For an introduction to the volume snapshot feature, see Volume snapshots” on page 63. More detailed descriptions of each type of volume snapshot and the operations that you can perform on them may be found in the following sections:

Traditional third-mirrorbreak-off snapshots” on page 305

Full-sized instant snapshots” on page 307

Space-optimized instant snapshots” on page 309

Emulation of third-mirrorbreak-off snapshots” on page 310

Linked break-off snapshot volumes” on page 311

Cascaded snapshots” on page 312

Creating multiple snapshots” on page 317

Restoring the original volume from a snapshot” on page 317