LVM: Couldn't create temporary archive name

LVM (Logical Volume Management) is and has always been a great solution to dynamically provide storage for different purposes. Volumes can be extended online without a downtime. See here if you want need to know more of it.

Normally, if you want to provide more storage to a volume, you just execute

$ lvresize -L 6g /dev/mapper/system-root

After that, the filesystem can be extended to the new size of the volume:

$ xfs_growfs /dev/mapper/system-root

Or you tell lvextend to do that itself by using the -r parameter:

$ $ lvresize -r -L 6g /dev/mapper/system-root

But when the volume space is completely exhausted, LVM is not able to do a metadata backup. It will fail like that:

$ lvresize -r -L 6g /dev/mapper/system-root
Size of logical volume system/root changed from 5.00 GiB (1280 extents) to 6.00 GiB (1536 extents). Couldn't create temporary archive name.

This can be solved by switching off the autobackup:

$ lvresize -An -L 6g /dev/mapper/system-root
Size of logical volume system/root changed from 5.00 GiB (1280 extents) to 6.00 GiB (1536 extents). Logical volume system/root successfully resized. WARNING: This metadata update is NOT backed up.

After that, it's possible to extend the filesystem (see above). Or again, you use the -r prameter to do that from within the lvextend command.

But as you disable the metadata autobackup by using lvextend -An, it could be a problem. Be sure to manually do the metadata backup:

$ vgcfgbackup
Volume group "system" successfully backed up.

Or do an additional lvextend without changing the size of the volume.