LVM and Snapshots
LVM snapshots are designed more to back up and checkpoint a filesystem than as a means of long-term storage. It's important to keep LVM snapshots relatively fresh—or, in other words, make sure to drop them when your backup is done.[31]
Snapshot volumes can also be used as read-write backing store for domains, especially in situations where you just want to generate a quick domU for testing, based on some preexisting disk image. The LVM documentation notes that you can create a basic image, snapshot it multiple times, and modify each snapshot slightly for another domain. In this case, LVM snapshots would act like a block-level UnionFS. However, note that when a snapshot fills up, it's immediately dropped by the kernel. This may ...
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