5.5. Techniques to Create a Volume Snapshot
A snapshot is simply a consistent point-in-time copy of a volume. Consistency in this case is defined as the original application's ability to recognize the data; for example, a Microsoft Exchange server sees a data set as a valid Exchange store, and a Microsoft SQL server recognizes a data set as a valid SQL server database. The data set being referred to here is typically a logical volume.
Volume snapshots are becoming increasingly popular and are used for various different reasons, such as the following:
To back up a clone of a volume created with snapshot technology while the original volume continues to be used by applications. This is what Microsoft has done with the Windows XP volume shadow copy ...
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