Veritas Storage Foundation Intelligent Storage Provisioning 5.0 AdministratorÆs Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

107Administering instant snapshots
Creating instant snapshots
If you want to turn a snapshot into an independent volume, you must wait
for its contents to be synchronized with those of its parent volume.
You can use the vxsnap syncwait command to wait for the synchronization
of the snapshot volume to be completed, as shown here:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup ] syncwait snapvol
For example, you would use the following command to wait for
synchronization to finish on the snapshot volume, snap2myvol:
# vxsnap -g mydg syncwait snap2myvol
This command exits (with a return code of zero) when synchronization of
the snapshot volume is complete. The snapshot volume may then be moved
to another disk group or turned into an independent volume.
If required, you can use the following command to test if the
synchronization of a volume is complete:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup ] -F%incomplete snapvol
This command returns the value off if synchronization of the volume,
snapvol, is complete; otherwise, it returns the value on.
See “Controlling instant snapshot synchronization” on page 118.
2 Use fsck (or some utility appropriate for the application running on the
volume) to clean the temporary volume’s contents. For example, you can use
this command:
# fsck -F vxfs /dev/vx/rdsk/ diskgroup / snapshot
3 If you require a backup of the data in the snapshot, use an appropriate
utility or operating system command to copy the contents of the snapshot to
tape, or to some other backup medium.
You have the following choices for what to do with an instant snapshot:
■ Refresh the contents of the snapshot. This creates a new point-in-time
image of the original volume ready for another backup. If synchronization
was already in progress on the snapshot, this operation may result in large
portions of the snapshot having to be resynchronized.
See “Refreshing an instant snapshot” on page 111.
■ Restore the contents of the original volume from the snapshot volume. For
full instant snapshot volumes, you can choose whether none, a subset, or all
of the plexes of the snapshot volume are returned to the original volume as a
result of the operation. A space-optimized instant snapshot always remains
intact at the end of the operation.
See “Restoring a volume from an instant snapshot” on page 113.
■ Dissociate the snapshot volume entirely from the original volume. This may
be useful if you want to use the copy for other purposes such as testing or
report generation. If desired, you can delete the dissociated volume.
See “Dissociating an instant snapshot” on page 114 for details.