LVM vs Volume Backup On NVME disk (blk_mq scheduler)

[gaia]

I have an NVME SSD disk running the blk_mq scheduler (as does every NVME disk). This disk has two volumes:

1 nvme0n1p1 vfat /boot/efi 512.00M
2 nvme0n1p2 LVM2_... 1.86T

Volume 2 has an LVM VG, with two LVs

node-vg 1.86T
> root / 40.00G (system disk, no unusual disk writes)
> data /mnt/data 1.82T (disk writes every second)

The manual says "The supported file system can reside on a simple volume or LVM2 volume. Supported I/O schedulers are deadline and cfq. Data that resides on other file systems and volumes can be backed up using the snapshot-less mode."

Question: given that the scheduler is not supported, to taken advantage of LVM snapshots and for better backup consistency, which backup plan should I create?

a) both volumes
b) volume 1 + the entire LVM VG
c) something else? If necessary I can do with temporarily stopping the apps that write to /mnt/data

[gaia]

Worth noting that for this primary backup I'd also like to do bare metal restore/disaster recovery.

[PTide]

Hi,

Snapshot-less mode performs file-level backup only, and Veeam cannot perform bare-metal restore from a file-level backup. That is, in order to perform BMR you'll have to create a new system manually and restore files from the backup after that.

Given that the current version of VAL does not have a very good performance in file-level backup (that will be significantly improved in future versions), I'd suggest to create two separate jobs - one job for /boot/efi and /root, another job for /mnt/data. Since you want to utilize LVM snapshots, make sure that you schedule a snapshot creation beforehand and the snapshot has the same name every time it is created so Veeam can find it. For snapshot creation you can schedule a script of your own that starts a couple of seconds before the actual job, use pre-job and post-job script settings for that.

By the way, what distro are you using?

Thanks!

[gaia]

Thanks P Tide! I will try that. It's Ubuntu 18.04.2