Hi Igor,

There's one potential problem - if your backup does not finish in time between 2 snapshots, they will rotate (say, hourly.0 will become hourly.1, and the new hourly.0 has started) , so in the end you're backing up not what you started backing up. For scheduled backups one should be cautious to, for example, do a full backup from weekly.0 and incremental one from nightly.0, but if you're doing a on-the-fly dump, always keep your snapshot schedule in mind.

The snapshots used to rotate and dump would then crash the filer, since all its knowledge about a static filesystem just changed! So now we lock the snapshot that dump is backing up and the rotation of snapshots would fail which is also not good, but preserves data availability.

You can create (or rename) snapshots with your own names, such as vob_snap, but once you do this you (the user) are managing the snapshot, i.e. dump creates & deletes its snapshots, snapmirror creates & deletes its snapshots, snap sched creates & ... well you get the picture.

Cheers, Grant