General Procedure for Creating Snapshots

Depending on how much disk space is available in your RAID storage, you should plan how much of disk capacity will be used as production volumes and how much is left for snapshots. Although snapshot images usually occupy a very small portion of disk space comparing with the size of the production volumes, it may be necessary to reserve an unused volume if you expect a complete volume recovery in the future.

1. Depending on how often snapshots are taken and how frequently your data is updated (copy on write), segregate your storage space into the source volumes and the snapshot volumes. You may use two logical drives, one for source and the other for snapshots; or you may partition a logical drive into two, one for source and the other for snapshots. If your data in source volume is frequently and competely changed, you may need a snapshot volume of the equivalent capacity.

2. The second step is the RAID array creation process. Observe all standard array configuration concerns.

3. Create Snapshot Container, and associate its Snapshot Set with a source volume, (note that whenever a Snapshot Container is created, the first Snapshot Set under the container is automatically created).

4. Assign snapshot purge policies.

5. Use snapshot scheduler to automate snapshot operation.

6. You may also manually create snapshots for a specific source volume. (Note that host I/Os should stopped and OS/application cache flushed, before taking snapshots.)

Back to Help Contents