I'm setting up a couple of SL 5.1 file-servers and I'm wondering if I can safely combine LVM snapshots with ext3 filesystems. I would like to take a snapshot of my main user file system at midnight every night but the question I have is "will the filesystem be in a consistent state?". I'm concerned about in-memory caching of inodes, data, etc. happening at the file-system level. Obviously, to safely snapshot a live file system the block-level device needs to tell the file-system layer to sync to "disk" (i.e. disk and/or block-level cache) and either temporarily suspend writes or just suspend file-system cache changes. The LVM HOWTO says: "many of the filesystems in the 2.6 kernel do this automatically when a snapshot is created" but I can't find anything definite. If I can't do this then snapshotting doesn't seem much different from just unplugging a disk! Does anybody have any experience of this? Thanks John