Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
Hi Scott,
One could always run the mailstore on LVM and then you could snapshot the mount and then fsck it while still technically in use. It would probably slow down the filesystem, but it is still live. Uhm, and then you have a nice and fsck'd snapshot, but your live filesystem will still be untouched? Or do you propose replacing the mailstore with a (readonly?) versioned mounted from the lvm snapshot? I'm not aware of anything that can swap filesystems like this online (ie, with files open) and that would also mean that while fsck'ing, you can only read mail, not receive, move or delete mail?
Changes made to a snapshot will never been seen by the fs it was snapshotted from and vice-versa. It uses copy on write which will get progressively slower as the snapshot and the origional diverge until you end up with a performance disaster.
http://www.nikhef.nl/~dennisvd/lvmcrap.html
~Seth