[rbranson]

FYI: On Linux, you can do instant snapshots with LVM. This is pretty useful as it's possible to snapshot an InnoDB database as it's running without losing data.

[davcro]

This doesn't work at scale. The IO performance with LVM is terrible. I lost a lot of money trying to implement this. Percona wrote Xtrabackup as a replacement for LVM.

Documentation:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/05/disaster-lvm-...

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/02/24/xtrabackup-op...

[spudlyo]

The write performance with LVM is terrible.

LVM snapshots on read slaves or during times when you have sufficient write capacity work as advertised.