Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/914031/

As a general rule, one need not have worked in the technology industry for
long before the value of good data backups becomes clear. Creating a
backup that is truly good, though, can be a challenge if the filesystem in
question is actively being changed while the backup process runs. Over the
years, various ways of addressing this problem have been developed, ranging
from simply shutting down the system while backups run to a variety of
snapshotting mechanisms. The kernel may be about to get another approach
to snapshots should the blksnap
patch set from Sergei Shtepa find its way into the mainline.