Monitoring Mounted EXT3 Filesystem Consistency

[me-5yx05kfkO/aqeI1yJSURBw at public.gmane.org (Matthew Gillen)]

Allan Morrison wrote:
> So my question is: "Does anyone have any methods or strategies for
> overseeing the consistency of a filesystem (ext3) that is not permitted
> offline without documented proof of a problem that needs a addressing?"
> 
> So far the idea that I have is to run and e2fsck -n on them weekly and
> monitor the results of the first three passes seem pretty believable.
> The Inode and block counts seem to come out wrong pretty much every
> time, even on a freshly minted unused 1gb filesystem I made for testing
> this idea. I even tried syncing the filesystem first, and that didn't
> even change the #'s the wrong counts found.

If you put your ext3 on top of LVM, you can take an LVM snapshot and do an
fsck on that.

This will give you a taste (shows how to make the snapshot and then mount it):
  Taking a Backup Using Snapshots
  http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/snapshots_backup.html

HTH,
Matt