I split my disk up into fossil, venti, and other (as well as a few other small partitions like nvram and fs).
My 'other' filesystem is a fossil partition but it is never dumped to venti as it only holds files which are temporary or which are already backed up elsewhere - e.g. CDROM ISO images. Don't forget you can always grow your venti by adding more arenas partitions. More indexes can be added also - rebuilt from your existing arena partitions). Even fossil can be grown though you will need a new bigger partition or grow the existing one using fs(3), this can then be refreshed from a venti snapshot. Having had some disk failures in the past I built my server with two mirrored disks and fs(3) config in seperate partitions for Mirrored, A-only and B-only. Thus when one disk fails I can quickly reboot onto the working disk. -Steve
