{"slug": "lvm", "name": "LVM", "category": "files", "category_name": "Files, sync and backup", "description": "", "recommenders": 2, "commenters": 6, "warners": 1, "score": 1.692, "rising": 0.67, "first": "2025-12-30", "latest": "2026-09-11", "why": "I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops.", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 3, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0], "listed": false, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops.", "icon": false, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["LVM"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 794636880, "item_id": 49664805, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664805", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops.", "excerpt": "My short answer is \"Not frequently, but when I do, I'd be very angry about having to screw around repartitioning a disk instead of fiddling with an LV, VG, or some PVs.\". I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops. Given that few (no?) filesystems support online shrinking but every one that you'd use as '/' supports online growing, my strategy is to take a fairly conservative guess", "context": "Linux user running servers and desktops", "use_case": "flexible disk volume management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stop making swap partitions\u2014use swap files instead"}, {"id": 760029472, "item_id": 47501842, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501842", "by": "PunchyHamster", "date": "2026-03-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Add a file inside ramdisk (i use /dev/shm) as LVM PV.", "excerpt": "> Well, what can we try instead? > write to the mounted disk anyways. fuck you Stupid penguin trick I learned: Add a file inside ramdisk (i use /dev/shm) as LVM PV. pvmove off the hard drive Boom, now your OS lives entirely in RAM You can now even replace the hard disk, put a new one and migrate back. Or migrate to network storage (nbd,iSCSI etc.), re-sequence disks into whatever RAID you need, and migrate back Need ", "context": "", "use_case": "moving OS into RAM", "switched_from": "", "story": "curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 781270113, "item_id": 48829382, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48829382", "by": "KaiserPro", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "everytime I saw lvm I inwardly sighed. The docs were terrible", "excerpt": "> in the past for ext4 over lvm I used to look after storage arrays for VFX places. everytime I saw lvm I inwardly sighed. The docs were terrible, almost as bad as MDADM. snapshots were for a long time unrecoverable. You'd then have to work out what pattern of LV you had, was it a suprise raid0? or a misaligned raid1? zfs is a night and day compared to LVM/mdadm, two tools, rich help, the man pages are reasonably goo", "context": "looked after storage arrays for VFX places", "use_case": "storage volume management", "switched_from": "", "story": "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS"}]}], "who": [{"by": "simoncion", "context": "Linux user running servers and desktops", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664805", "date": "2026-09-11"}, {"by": "asteroidburger", "context": "Runs a home NAS", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496078", "date": "2026-08-30"}, {"by": "linsomniac", "context": "Backs up VMs critical to developers", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46479035", "date": "2026-01-03"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["flexible disk volume management", "nas storage", "storage volume management", "moving os into ram", "vm snapshots for backup", "drive management"], "compared": [{"slug": "zfs", "name": "ZFS", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618087", "title": "Stop making swap partitions\u2014use swap files instead", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494856", "title": "FreeCORE TrueNAS Core \u2013 Continued", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48827325", "title": "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47500522", "title": "curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46466734", "title": "The rsync algorithm (1996) [pdf]", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436889", "title": "FediMeteo: A \u20ac4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"warn": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 794636880, "item_id": 49664805, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49664805", "by": "simoncion", "date": "2026-09-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops.", "excerpt": "My short answer is \"Not frequently, but when I do, I'd be very angry about having to screw around repartitioning a disk instead of fiddling with an LV, VG, or some PVs.\". I use LVM on all my non-appliance Linux systems, [0] both servers and desktops. Given that few (no?) filesystems support online shrinking but every one that you'd use as '/' supports online growing, my strategy is to take a fairly conservative guess", "context": "Linux user running servers and desktops", "use_case": "flexible disk volume management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Stop making swap partitions\u2014use swap files instead"}, {"id": 791937249, "item_id": 49496078, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496078", "by": "asteroidburger", "date": "2026-08-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "It's really not hard to setup LVM and Samba.", "excerpt": "Yeah, I just run bare Debian myself. It's really not hard to setup LVM and Samba. And all of the major frontier models are well-versed in those things, so I used their help to get all of the various bits setup to make access from MacOS fast.", "context": "Runs a home NAS", "use_case": "NAS storage", "switched_from": "", "story": "FreeCORE TrueNAS Core \u2013 Continued"}, {"id": 781270113, "item_id": 48829382, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48829382", "by": "KaiserPro", "date": "2026-07-08", "stance": "warn", "quote": "everytime I saw lvm I inwardly sighed. The docs were terrible", "excerpt": "> in the past for ext4 over lvm I used to look after storage arrays for VFX places. everytime I saw lvm I inwardly sighed. The docs were terrible, almost as bad as MDADM. snapshots were for a long time unrecoverable. You'd then have to work out what pattern of LV you had, was it a suprise raid0? or a misaligned raid1? zfs is a night and day compared to LVM/mdadm, two tools, rich help, the man pages are reasonably goo", "context": "looked after storage arrays for VFX places", "use_case": "storage volume management", "switched_from": "", "story": "How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS"}, {"id": 760029472, "item_id": 47501842, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47501842", "by": "PunchyHamster", "date": "2026-03-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Add a file inside ramdisk (i use /dev/shm) as LVM PV.", "excerpt": "> Well, what can we try instead? > write to the mounted disk anyways. fuck you Stupid penguin trick I learned: Add a file inside ramdisk (i use /dev/shm) as LVM PV. pvmove off the hard drive Boom, now your OS lives entirely in RAM You can now even replace the hard disk, put a new one and migrate back. Or migrate to network storage (nbd,iSCSI etc.), re-sequence disks into whatever RAID you need, and migrate back Need ", "context": "", "use_case": "moving OS into RAM", "switched_from": "", "story": "curl > /dev/sda: How I made a Linux distro that runs wget | dd"}, {"id": 743664561, "item_id": 46479035, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46479035", "by": "linsomniac", "date": "2026-01-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I take an LVM snapshot of the VM", "excerpt": "If you want to do similar for block devices: https://github.com/rolffokkens/bdsync I use it to back up a few virtual machines that, in the event of a site loss, would be difficult to rebuild but also critical to getting our developers back to work. I take an LVM snapshot of the VM, then use bdsync to replicate it to our backup server, and from there I replicate it off to backblaze, then destroy the snapshot.", "context": "Backs up VMs critical to developers", "use_case": "VM snapshots for backup", "switched_from": "", "story": "The rsync algorithm (1996) [pdf]"}, {"id": 743069986, "item_id": 46441874, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46441874", "by": "arjie", "date": "2025-12-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "just relying on an LVM of the drives", "excerpt": "Enjoyable read. I wish I'd paid more attention to the *BSDs when I was younger because I'm set in my Linux ways now and simply cannot find it in myself to try them. The ZFS plus jails support seems to have been the low friction way that he managed things here. I use podman, but I haven't ever tried ZFS on Linux, instead just relying on an LVM of the drives. I will remedy at least that last error soon since I want to ", "context": "", "use_case": "drive management", "switched_from": "", "story": "FediMeteo: A \u20ac4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service"}]}