Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive?

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:58 PM, gevisz <gevisz@×××××.com> wrote:
> 2016-09-01 14:55 GMT+03:00 Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>:
>
>> 2. Set it up as an LVM partition.  Unless you're using filesystems
>> like zfs/btrfs that have their own way of doing volume management,
>> this just makes things less painful down the road.
>>
>> 3. I'd probably just set it up as one big logical volume, unless you
>> know you don't need all the space and you think you might use it for
>> something else later.  You can change your mind on this with ext4+lvm
>> either way, but better to start out whichever way seems best.
>
> I had to refresh my memory about LVM before replying to you
> but still can not see why I may need LVM on an external
> hard drive...

It just gives you more options in the future, it is easy to move LVM
volumes to other drives, re-partition them later, and so on.  I agree
it is probably overkill on a removable device, but it doesn't hurt.
This is a 5TB drive after all.  But, I don't think it is
super-critical either.

>
>> It will take you all of 30 seconds to format this, unless you're
>> running badblocks (which almost nobody does, because...
>
> it takes too much time?
>
> I currently running a smart test on it, and it promised to take
> 10 hours to complete...

That's basically it.  If it didn't take time people would of course
run it first.  I think a SMART test would be about as good and likely
a lot faster.  However, the drive should be managing bad blocks on its
own (granted, many drives seem to get that wrong in my experience,
which is part of why I run btrfs, but I probably wouldn't use
btrfs/zfs for a drive you're moving all over the place since who knows
what kind of kernel you'll have when you use it and heaven help you if
you ever need to read it on Windows).

>
>> You seem to be concerned about losing data.  You should be.  This is a
>> physical storage device.  You WILL lose everything stored on it at
>> some point in time.
>
> Last time, I have managed to restore all the data from my 2.5" hard
> drive that suddenly died about 7 years ago and hope to do it again
> if any. :)

Well, if the data is redundant then you're fine (it is essentially
already backed up).  But, you should check those backups from time to
time.

You should never rely on the ability to recover data from a hard
drive.  For starters, if you just lose the thing (portable things can
sometimes grow legs; you're talking about 5 libraries of congress in a
bag that could get stolen) or it is catastrophically destroyed that
isn't going to work.  Short of that there is a fair chance you can get
a lot of data off the drive, and it is fairly likely if you're using
some kind of expensive recovery service, but you can't promise that
the specific file you care about most will get recovered.

Backups are annoying.  I don't do them as well as ideally I should
(way too much data to get it all offsite), but I make a conscious
decision about what does/doesn't get backed up and how.  I
occasionally restore my encrypted cloud backups to confirm they
contain what I expect them to.  I actually get the log summary emailed
daily to make sure it is running (if I had more hosts I could use some
kind of monitoring for that...).  I've never needed to use the online
cloud backups, but they're there for a reason and they cover anything
I actually care about (documents and such).  I also backup all my
cloud services (evernote, google drive, etc) to local storage
occassionally; that doesn't require further backup since it is the
backup.  You just need two copies of everything, with one copy
preferably being inaccessible from the other and not at the same
physical site.

-- 
Rich