Should clarify that OP is talking about a consumer use case. In the enterprise space, quiescing applications and databases during a snapshot was standard at least as far back as 1992 when I started working on HA software which would (among its other functions) automate the process. For quite a few years after that, I worked on systems where block-level snapshots were more common (and performed better) than filesystem-level. Filesystem snapshots are great, and it's also great to warn people about the dangers of doing backups without some sort of protection against in-flight changes, but the title as written isn't quite correct.
For quite a few years after 1992 we didn't really have simple solutions that could do atomic snapshots. I'm not sure about specialised enterprise cases, but for Linux consumers, the first one would be lvm right? (And that was not write-barrier-safe until 2010)
Comments
Should clarify that OP is talking about a consumer use case. In the enterprise space, quiescing applications and databases during a snapshot was standard at least as far back as 1992 when I started working on HA software which would (among its other functions) automate the process. For quite a few years after that, I worked on systems where block-level snapshots were more common (and performed better) than filesystem-level. Filesystem snapshots are great, and it's also great to warn people about the dangers of doing backups without some sort of protection against in-flight changes, but the title as written isn't quite correct.
For quite a few years after 1992 we didn't really have simple solutions that could do atomic snapshots. I'm not sure about specialised enterprise cases, but for Linux consumers, the first one would be lvm right? (And that was not write-barrier-safe until 2010)