Storage management preparation before disaster

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1

I lost some storage yesterday. It looked like this:

SSD[ LUKS{ LVG( LV<ext4> ) } ]

i.e. an entire ssd, luks-encrypted, logical volume group containing a single logical volume which itself contained a single ext4 partition. (There’s a PV in there, too, but I’m out of matching brackets.:slight_smile: ) The LUKS bit worked, but nothing I tried could make sense of the LVG. I ended up rebuilding it as

SSD[ LUKS{ ext4 } ]

b/c it’ll never be expanded and the extra layers just caused confusion. Fortunately/ridiculously, the whole thing is a backup volume for the local machine, so I just ran my backup script after wiping, reconfiguring, and mounting it at the same mount point. There’s no indication of hardware failure; for this discussion, let’s assume the hardware is okay.

My question is, could I have, or should I have, done something to simplify recovering from this sort of failure? Possibly w/o losing the month’s worth of daily backups? I’m an LVG/LV novice (as if that isn’t obvious). There seemed to be some options in the pv*, vg*, and lv* commands to restore or repair damaged headers etc., but they apparently expect to be given previously gathered data. The tutorials I initially followed to set this up didn’t go into gathering such info prophylactically or how to use it to recover from damage.

2

LVM is most useful on servers where you need flexible space management to dynamically create/remove/resize volumes, efficiently utilize non-contiguous space fully abstracting from the hardware, use RAID for redundancy and rely on high availability for live OS migration.

A simple backup service might not need all of the above features, but data integrity, compression and deduplication are important, and you can utilize it with Btrfs, although Ext4 is also a good choice if you prefer simplicity and stability above all else.

Unfortunately, discussing lost data recovery is problematic unless you have a full disk dump and can gather the necessary diagnostics.