I discovered that I have LVM when I tried to free up space on my PC with F8 installed. I am a newbie and want to preserve my current software installs until I get everything working in F10. But LVM presents some new issues as far as backup and repartition. BTW, I plan to avoid LVM on the F10 install. I wish it wasn't the default.

In the past I have used partimage (on SystemRescue CD) to do complete system backups (with dd to get the partition table as I recall). This apparently will not work with LVM. I need a fairly simple way to backup to USB HD and restore if needed. Size of backup is not a major consideration although only about 5G of the 75G partition is used - it would be nice not to image the empty space.

I am thinking of doing something along the lines of this:

blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=8759&page=3

I would post the URLs in a more friendly way but I don't have enough posts on this board to do that yet...

For resizing the LVM the simplest step by step I have found is this:
blog.shadypixel.com/how-to-shrink-an-lvm-volume-safely/

I am a bit aprehensive about doing this as I have a LOT of time in my current setup. Does this seem like a reasonable plan? Any specific issues I should be aware of? Apparenlty LVM is done a bit differently in different distros or at least the tools available are different?

Thanks!