LVM - or simply Logical Volume Manager, Linux LVM is the implementation of Logical Volume Manager for the Linix kernel. Most of the Linux distributions include LVM. Besides obvious benefits of using Logical Volume Manager there is also a great feature - LVM snapshot capability that is included in Linux LVM

LVM snapshot is an awesome tool that is included with your Linux distribution at no charge to you! LVM snapshot allows you to create a new block device that is the exact copy of the logical volume frozen in time.

Why this is such a great capability? Say you have a 500GB database and need to create a replicated slave or take a database backup. In order to do that you have to resort to one of the following:

1. Stop the database (or flush tables with read lock) and copy the files - that could take several hours.

2. Use INNODB backup tools - still will take quite some time and that does …