Just a warning if the trend is to use LVM by default, this may cause conflicts/issues if the user want to do some fancy disk work of their own, like Soft-RAID or FakeRAID. Especially since FakeRAID device nodes created by dmraid are created in /dev/mapper. - Richard Bailey <div>On 11/16/06, <a href="mailto:ubuntu-devel-request@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-devel-request@lists.ubuntu.com</a> <<a href="mailto:ubuntu-devel-request@lists.ubuntu.com"> ubuntu-devel-request@lists.ubuntu.com</a>> wrote:<div>  </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2006 10:58:14 +0200 From: Sivan Greenberg <<a href="mailto:sivan@ubuntu.com">sivan@ubuntu.com</a>> Subject: Re: Prototype for the time machine similar solution as you         noted   in h-u-b whiteboard. To: Erast Benson < <a href="mailto:erast@gnusolaris.org">erast@gnusolaris.org</a>> Cc: <a href="mailto:ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com</a>,      Ulrik Mikaelsson         <<a href="mailto:ulrik.mikaelsson@gmail.com"> ulrik.mikaelsson@gmail.com</a>> Message-ID: <<a href="mailto:455C2826.1020500@ubuntu.com">455C2826.1020500@ubuntu.com</a>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Erast Benson wrote: > I think you are right. And LVM is the right place to do such things. > Unfortunetly it is quite limited on functionality. OpenSolaris's ZFS > would be way better fit, but it is not an option for GNU/Linux users at > the moment. I wasn't suggesting that it was not the right tool for the job, and I regret if that is what was implied from my reply. Lets take this further then, to make this work for the average user we need: 1) Use LVM by default to set up users system and storage. 2) Automatically create the LV that will store the snapshots for the user. This should probably be carried by a question to the user about how robust he wants his "going-back-in-time" ability and explain to him the proportional need for redundant disk space. 3) develop a simple UI on top of the tools to manage the snapshots such that it would be easy for the user to track changes, see in which snapshot the content he wants is, and allow him easily and safely return to any of the snapshots requiring minimum understanding to what goes behind the scenes in order to do so. So if this was to be a spec, it would have been dependant on an "Enable LVM by default" one. We should probably examine the situation in Fedora/Redhat to see the benefits and the downsides of enabling LVM by default. Sivan </blockquote></div>