[TriLUG] Partitioning recommendations

Shawn Hartsock hartsock at acm.org
Fri Jul 13 10:31:34 EDT 2007


Partitions:

Since you know that you are using this disk to hold backups, I'd say
you've already considered the reasons for partitions and this drive is
for the backup partition... eh. Not much to say I guess why not make
it all one partition. I assume the rest of your partitions are well
thought out.

Otherwise, Find what directory is cramped and move it to the new drive?

I mean you could end up with something like this:

df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdb2              24G   23G 1004M  96% /
udev                  1.7G  112K  1.7G   1% /dev
/dev/hda1             2.0G   38M  1.9G   2% /boot
/dev/hdb1             187G  153G   35G  82% /home
/dev/hda6             3.9G  2.5G  1.3G  67% /www

... ooh, I'm using too much space in / I guess I need to look at that.
Maybe I need to move tmp or var to its own partition.

Mount point:

When I'm working out a filesystem hierarchy I usually check with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard

... and see if there are any sensible suggestions here.

/usr/local is for data specific to your machine. I find myself using
that too much... /var is for variable files like spools and logs...
perhaps backups belong under here? /mnt is for temporary mount points.

I would probably have put this under /mnt/backups with the idea that
it could get moved later.

Tomatoes:

I think 3 tomatoes are plenty.

Questions:

What is the goal of your backup routine?
What is the goal of your backup partition?
Is this data sensitive enough to warrant tape backup?

-- 
-- Shawn Hartsock -- http://hartsock.blogspot.com/

On 7/13/07, Jos Purvis <purvis at melete.org> wrote:
> ...but not quite the usual question. I have this-here big-ol' 320GB
> secondary disk that I just installed this morning in my workstation.
> It's intended to be reserved for backups (long story) of another
> machine, creating a local Yum repository...stuff like that. The OS is
> quite happy on its own 80GB disk, so I'm looking to just put, say,
> /opt on this one and slap all of the backup/repository/whatever
> storage under there.
>
> Here's my question: does it matter how I partition the disk? My first
> instinct was to just create one huge partition of 320GB, then I
> thought I should do something with LVM for fun, then I realized it's
> just one disk, so LVM would seem silly if I'm not creating multiple
> partitions. Is there any reason (performance or otherwise) not to just
> create one partition and move on? Am I overthinking this entirely?
> When making stewed tomatoes, are three enough? Are four too many?
>
> Thoughts?
>
>     --Jos
> --
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