Linux Hot Copy

Linux Hot Copy is a free universal disk snapshot utility for Linux servers. The award-winning Linux Hot Copy can almost instantly create a point-in-time snapshot of any block device while the system is running and without interrupting any applications.

Furthermore, Hot Copy snapshots are both readable and writable. This makes them extremely useful in system administration, permitting admins to test scripts and apps before running them in a live environment.

Linux Hot Copy is produced by R1Soft, a subsidiary of application and server management industry leader Idera.

Linux Hot Copy Works Like Volume Shadow Copy Service for Windows

Windows administrators are able to use VSS to take point in time snapshots, but Linux admins didn’t have access to the same kind of tool until Linux Hot Copy. We developed Linux Hot Copy so every Linux server can also have a quick and easy universal disk snapshot.

Hot Copy Outperforms LVM snapshots

Linux Hot Copies are smarter than logical volume manager (LVM) snapshots. Hot Copy is designed with built-in file system awareness for Ext2/3/4 ReiserFS 3. This enables improved performance as Hot Copy can determine which parts of the block device are used by the file system, so when you write to unused blocks on the disk, Hot Copy won’t perform a copy-on-write for these disk writes.

Furthermore, with Hot Copy you don’t need dedicated Volume Group space to maintain the snapshot. Linux Hot Copy assigns free space on your block device for storage automatically, which means you can use it on any device or choose to assign an alternate device with more space as a changed block store.