Hi all, I’m playing around with LVMs to expand data storage and I’m looking at what would be required to transfer those drives to another device, all the steps I can find require exporting the volume group and then importing on the other device. But what would be the case if your boot drive were to fail, and you needed to move the drives without being able to export the volume group. Can you just do an import with a new device, or are there other steps required to do so?

Secondly, is there a benefit to creating an LVM volume with a btrfs filesystem vs just letting btrfs handle it?

  • Synestine@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    9 days ago

    LVM itself does not provide redundancy, that’s RAID. LVM is often used on top of a RAID device. If your boot drive fails, LVM itself won’t save you, RAID (software RAID 1 is really common for a boot drive) can.

    LVM can be used to seamlessly move data between physical volumes. You can add a new PV to the VG and move extents between LVs. I’ve used it to love-migrate to a larger drive that way. Once the physical extents have been moved to the new PV, you can reduce the old PV and then remove the old disk.

    • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      LVM itself does not provide redundancy, that’s RAID.

      I think this is potentially a bit confusing.

      LVM does provide RAID functionality and can be used to set up and manage redundant volumes.

      See --type and --mirror under man 8 lvcreate.