Joshua

This is absolutely true but creating the opportunity to perform a logical
volume backup is another issue. Any logical volume activity must be quiesced
for this to work properly. In almost every circumstance this means the
filesystem must be unmounted. This should be carefully considered when
thinking about using this feature otherwise you can create backups which are
of no use. Also think of the headaches and callouts this will cause when an
app hasn't been shut down properly and the filesystem won't unmount.

Used properly however I agree this is a good step forward. Using a single
database object to store a filesystem of data leads to great scalability.
Perhaps the disruption this kind of backup causes is justifiable once a
month just for this reason. Look how unsuccessful the NT bare metal restore
diskettes were simply because you had to take the box down to use it.

A decent filesystem on all machines which incorporated intelligent
journalling/snapshots/file-to-block mapping that a backup tool could exploit
would be much better. One day.....

Regards
Alan