Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Administrator's Guide (September 2006)

Chapter
9
Administering volume
snapshots
Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) provides the capability for taking an image of a volume
at a given point in time. Such an image is referred to as a volume snapshot. You can also
take a snapshot of a volume set as described in “Creating instant snapshots of volume sets”
on page 324.
Volume snapshots allow you to make backup copies of your volumes online with minimal
interruption to users. You can then use the backup copies to restore data that has been lost
due to disk failure, software errors or human mistakes, or to create replica volumes for the
purposes of report generation, application development, or testing.
For an introduction to the volume snapshot feature, see “Volume snapshots” on page 63.
More detailed descriptions of each type of volume snapshot and the operations that you
can perform on them may be found in the following sections:
■ “Traditional third-mirror break-off snapshots” on page 297
■ “Full-sized instant snapshots” on page 299
■ “Space-optimized instant snapshots” on page 301
■ “Emulation of third-mirror break-off snapshots” on page 302
■ “Linked break-off snapshot volumes” on page 303
■ “Cascaded snapshots” on page 304
■ “Creating multiple snapshots” on page 308
■ “Restoring the original volume from a snapshot” on page 308