Diff Between vgimport and vgcfgbackup

[Anitha_3]

Hi All,

I am bit confused on the concept of vgimport/vgexport and vgcfgrestore/vgcfgbackup.

kindly give me the differences between them.

and what scanario we use these commands..
it will be a great help for me.

Thanks in Advance
GOvinda G,

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Vgexport is used to completely remove the /dev/vgxx/* files on a host and also remove the entries in /etc/lvmtab. Vgexport -p (preview mode) is used primarily to create map files for later vgimports on the same or another host. The most important thing to remember about vgexport is that is does not alter the contents of the LVM disks themselves just the data ABOUT the disks on the host computer. Vgimport is used to import these disks on the same or another hosts.

Vgcfgbackup is a command which is automatically run by many LVM commands. It write the LVM data structure information to a regular file. This data only consist of the LVM layout but not about any other contents of the disk. For example, vgcfgbackup does not backup any data stored in an LVOL or a filesystem. Vgcfgrestore can use one of the files created by vgcfgrestore to write the LVM metadata on a new disk. For example, when you are replacing an LVM disk, you can use vfcfgrestore to write all the LVM data to the disk instead of doing a pvcreate.