This article also fails to consider that on modern systems writes are often batched and not immediate. The only way to get an actually consistent and safe backup of any file / file system, is to actually shut down the machine so that all applications, and the OS, have shut down gracefully.
As an intermediate step, it may be practical to consider shutting down your application, flush all writes (e.g. via sync command), and taking the file system snapshot then, restarting the application, and then taking the backup from that file system snapshot. At least then your critical data should have a consistent and safe backup, even if the rest of the OS _may_ be in a suspect state.
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This article also fails to consider that on modern systems writes are often batched and not immediate. The only way to get an actually consistent and safe backup of any file / file system, is to actually shut down the machine so that all applications, and the OS, have shut down gracefully.
As an intermediate step, it may be practical to consider shutting down your application, flush all writes (e.g. via sync command), and taking the file system snapshot then, restarting the application, and then taking the backup from that file system snapshot. At least then your critical data should have a consistent and safe backup, even if the rest of the OS _may_ be in a suspect state.