LVM

Logical volume manager (LVM) allows you to create a quick snapshot that can be used for backups. Apart from that, you can perform migration with easy rollback. This is a little bit out of the scope of this chapter, but as it is quick and could be very useful, we'll discuss it.

LVM is not a MariaDB tool, but a device mapper solution providing snapshot solutions. If you're using advanced filesystems such as ZFS or BTRFS, you can also use the snapshot feature to create backups.

Snapshot

To make a usable MariaDB datadir snapshot, you first need to lock your tables:

MariaDB [(none)]> flush tables with read lock;

Now we're sure there will be no changes on our instance. Let's create the snapshot on the system:

> lvcreate --snapshot -n snap_mariadb -L 2G /dev/data/mariadb

Here is a list of used commands:

• --snapshot: This indicates we want to create an LVM snapshot
• -n: This is the name of the snapshot
• -L: This is the size of the snapshot
• /dev/data/mariadb: This is the logical...