A wonderful facility provided by LVM is 'snapshots'. This allows the administrator to create a new block device which is an exact copy of a logical volume, frozen at some point in time. Typically this would be used when some batch processing, a backup for instance, needs to be performed on the logical volume, but you don't want to halt a live system that is changing the data. When the snapshot device has been finished with the system administrator can just remove the device. This facility does require that the snapshot be made at a time when the data on the logical volume is in a consistent state, later sections of this document give some examples of this.
More information on snapshots can be found in Section 11.4Taking a Backup Using Snapshots.