Is there any way to deal with incoming writes while a backup is in progress in linux. Example, you are writing to your sql database and lvm snapshotting at the same time. This will result in corrupted data because the snapshot will include only parts of that write. VSS gets past this problem with having all services get to a clean state before snapshotting. I don't see of any real solution in Linux.
Linux snapshotting issues
linux kernel;lvm;snapshot