I agree that trying to size partitions optimally is an annoying
chore, but I gather LVM should help with that problem - though I
havn't tried it yet.
However I disagree about the drive wear argument. Sensible partitioning
can be used to reduce seek time by keeping related data together, and
more importantly can significantly reduce the drive wear and tear
associated with the nightly backups.
If rarely changing filesystems are mounted read-only, they don't need to
be scanned during the backups, and rebooting is much faster after a
crash.
For instance, here is a sample entry from my nightly backup script:
if mount|grep " /usr/local"|grep -q "read-only" ;then
echo "/usr/local is read-only, no backup required"
else
echo "Backing up /usr/local"
/sbin/mount -u -o rw /backup/local
/usr/local/bin/rsync -avH /usr/local/ /backup/local
/sbin/mount -u -o ro,nosuid,nodev /backup/local
/sbin/mount -u -o ro,nosuid,nodev /usr/local
fi
In addition, the tape dumps simply are not practical if the hard drive
is not partitioned. I try to limit all my partitions to the size of a
single tape, which now is 60GB but until recently was 10GB.
Of course I can sympathise with with your view that it is always the
wrong partition that gets corrupted, but having everything on one
partition only makes that more certain.
If the root partition is kept small and fairly static, then the
chances of not having a runable base from which to repair the rest
of the system is greatly reduced.
I have also had problems on some modest machines (<32MB memory) trying
to run fsck on very large partitions when the system is not fully booted.
Regards,
DigbyT
On Mon, Jun 06, 2005 at 06:52:49PM +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> when I go some years back, I alo had a bunch of partitions, but I went away
> from it for several reasons:
> it is a great waste of space
> at least one partition is always too small
> a lot moving head will reduce the lifetime of your hharddisk
> if a partition fails, it will always the wrong one.
> --
> gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.digbyt.com
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