Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive storage questions

[Dale]

Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Apr 2015 08:13:41 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
>>> An alternative is to create a new volume group on the new disk and
>>> mounts PVs at various points in your home directory. That way you get
>>> the extra space and much of the flexibility without the risk of a
>>> failure on a single drive taking out data on both. However, if you
>>> are concerned about data loss, you should be using RAID at a minimum,
>>> preferably with an error detecting filesystem.
>>
>> I've used that scheme myself in the past. You do get the increased space
>> but you don't get much in the way of flexibility. And it get COMPLICATED
>> really quickly.
>
> It certainly can, but for a simple two drive home system it shouldn't get
> out of hand. However, it does avoid the "one disk errors kills two
> disks' data" problem.

Yea, right now, I'm only using two drives.  One for the OS and one for
/home.  I have a third drive but it isn't in use.  I'm thinking about
moving everything but the videos to that drive, 750GB, and leave just
the videos on the large 3TB drive.  It'll free up a *little* space too.


>
>
>> To get around the situation of one drive almost full and the other
>> having lots of space, folks often use symlinked directories, which you
>> forget about and no-one else can figure out what you did...
>
> I wasn't suggesting symlinks, just LVs mounted at appropriate points. It
> rather depends on the spread of Dale's data. If he just needs extra space
> for his videos, he could get a new drive and mount it at ~/videos.

The bulk of the space is used by the videos.  It's everything from TV
shows to movies to youtube howtos.  I'm using roughly 1.8TB on the drive
and the videos take up roughly 1.7TB of that space.  My camera pics only
use 21GBs of space.  Rest is basically a rounding error.  :/

>
>> It all smacks of the old saw:
>>
>> For any non-trivial problem, there is always at least one solution that
>> is simple, elegant, and wrong.
>
> :-)
>
> I consider what I suggested somewhat simple but far from elegant. Often
> though, it's a lot less work in the long run to go for the initially more
> complex solution. If Dale is worried about the likelihood of disk
> failure, he really should be using RAID - either MDRAID under LVM or one
> of the next-gen filesystems.
>
>

I really do need to set up RAID at least for some stuff that I may not
be able to get back.  Some videos I have are no longer available.   What
I wish, I had a second puter in a outbuilding that I could copy to over
ethernet or something.  May help in the event of a house fire etc.

Dale

:-)  :-)