"Storage has gotten so cheap that 1TB bare drives are now costing less than $100 and 2TB drives appearing. Plus everyone knows that the amount of data always increases. This combination indicates that you should be prepared to manage your storage for growth.
"This is true even for home users with a simple desktop and it’s true for enterprise sites with tons of storage and very tight requirements on service levels. Linux has a great tool called LVM that can be used to effectively manage storage to make expansion, snapshots, and other aspects of storage fairly easy.
"This article will be a review for people already familiar with LVM. However, it may also be something new to people who haven’t used it or perhaps used it without knowing (many distributions use it during installation). But perhaps even more important, this article will talk about performing snapshots with LVM. Some people may know about taking snapshots with LVM but it is a very powerful feature that can ease backups, disaster recovery, off-site backups, etc. If it isn’t something you’ve done before then this article may entice you to think about the snapshot feature of LVM."
