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

[gevisz]

2016-09-01 15:51 GMT+03:00 Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com>:
>
> On Thursday, September 01, 2016 12:09:09 PM gevisz wrote:
>> 2016-09-01 11:54 GMT+03:00 Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk>:
>> > On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 11:49:43 +0300, gevisz wrote:
>> >> > If your filesystem becomes corrupt (and you are unable to
>> >> > repair it), *all* of your data is lost (instead of just
>> >> > one partition). That's the only disadvantage I can think
>> >> > of.
>> >>
>> >> That is exactly what I am afraid of!
>> >>
>> >> So, the 20-years old rule of thumb is still valid. :(
>> >>
>> >> > I don't like partitions either (after some years, I
>> >> > always found that sizes don't match my requirements any
>> >> > more),
>> >>
>> >> And this is exactly the reason why I do not want to partition
>> >> my new hard drive! :)
>> >
>> > Have you considered LVM? You get the benefits of separate filesystems
>> > without the limitations of inflexible partitioning.
>>
>> I am afraid of LVM because of the same reason as described below:
>>
>> returning to the "old good times" of MS DOS 6.22, I do remember that working
>> then on 40MB (yes, megabytes) hard drive I used some program that
>> compressed all the data before saving them on that hard drive.
>> Unfortunately, one day, because of the corruption, I lost all the data on
>> that hard drive. Since then, I am very much afraid of compressed or
>> encrypted hard drives.
>
> LVM doesn't *need* to do any of that. It will only do as much as you tell it
> to do. If you only want to use it as a way of reshaping relatively simple
> partitions, you can use it for that.
>
> Honestly, I tend not to create separate partitions for separate mount points
> these days. At least, not on personal systems. For servers, it's can be
> beneficial to have /var separate from /, or /var/log separate from /var, or
> /var/spool, or /var/lib/mysql, or what have you. But the biggest driver for
> that, IME, is if one of those fills up, it can't take down the rest of the
> host.
>
> In your case, I'd suggest using a single / filesystem. If it works, it works.
> If it doesn't, you'll know in the future where you need to be more flexible;
> there's no single panacea.

Thank you for the reply. And I even agree with you to the point that
on a Linux desktop it may be enough to have just 3 different partitions:
one - for /, second - for swap (yes, one can do without it nowadays),
and third - for /home. But you probably missed the point that it goes
about an external drive dedicated to backups only.