On Mon, 21 May 2018 08:26:01 +0000 (UTC) Curt <cu...@free.fr> wrote: > On 2018-05-21, Andy Smith <a...@strugglers.net> wrote: > > Hello, > > > > On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 07:59:48PM -0400, songbird wrote: > >> Pascal Hambourg wrote: > >> > Then LVM is your friend. You can create as many logical volumes > >> > as you like with minimal sizes and easily extend them when > >> > needed. This way you don't waste space in overprovisioning. > >> > >> added complexity for a simple system such as mine > >> is rather pointless. > > > > I hear that a lot from people who later find themselves doing > > cosmetic surgery on their partition table because they weren't able > > to initially size things properly. > > Verily in the installer I chose automatic partitioning because of my > partitioning phobia many moons ago and was allotted a 9G '/' and a > 1.4T 'home' (as well as swap the size of my ego), so find myself in a > predicament similar to that of the OP. > > (A recent thread seemed to imply that the installer's automagical > partitioner for LVM leaves little or no empty room for growth, thus > vitiating somewhat the very raison d'être of LVM at its root.) >
I think a lot of resizing issues have just gone away, as hard drive manufacturers have been able to increase [affordable] drive size even faster than Microsoft has expanded Windows. I don't run a hard drive online for more than about five years, retiring it to backup duty after that. The replacement drive is normally twice the size, or larger, and the original drive was large enough for me to have allocated massively more space than necessary. So resizing is rarely necessary in the life of one of my drives, and can easily be performed at the changeover. LVM snapshots are another matter. Over the years, I've not had any bad luck backing up live (home) systems using online copies, but I've always taken what precautions I could to minimise risk. Snapshots are a much safer way of doing this, and the performance hit while the shadow copy is active can be kept to a fairly short time. It does require a significant chunk of unallocated space, though in an emergency, an external drive can be temporarily added. -- Joe
