On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 09:25 -0500, Mike McCarty wrote: > > I guess I wasn't specific enough. I meant the historical > reasons they came into existence, not what uses were later > found for them. Unix has been using disk partitions well before the PC BIOS existed. > > > - ease of data backups > > I don't follow this. How does splitting my data up into chunks > make it easier to use or backup? Most tools that perform backups can be told to restrict themselves to a partition. If you use other methods, you could find your backup mechanism following symlinks and backing up more than was expected. You can also do a raw backup of just the parition you need - eg. dd the /boot partition to save it when messing with the bootloader. With the size of modern disks, I could never want to have just one big lump of disk. > > > - ease of operating system upgrades > > My reason (2) above is a superset of this. The last update I did, I could confidently do a "clean" install (preferable as it adds new OS features) knowing that all the custom work I had done in /usr/local would be left alone. Likewise /home was left untouched. The only backup/restore required was for various files in /etc. > > > - containment of runaway process consuming filesystem resources > > IMO, this is better served by having a separate disc. > But, a partition is cheaper in hardware. > Anyway, my rather fuzzy goal is to let all the non-system > stuff which dynamically changes size share a separate disc. I work with a laptop most of the time. A separate disk would be inconvenient. > > > - granularity of filesystem integrity checks > > I don't follow this. Are you trying to protect against > a disc corruption damaging or losing large amounts of > data? That is better handled by backup IMO. If you are > trying to protect against disc failure, then all the > partitions in the world won't mitigate the damage. If you need to fsck your disk, presumably you will be fscking a _huge_ partition. If you have many smaller paritions, the fsck only needs to repair the partition with the damaged filesystem. All your eggs are not in one basket. > > > - granularity of different raid choices > > Ordinary users don't need RAID, IMO. Also, IMO, this > is better done on a disc basis, not a partition basis. > Ordinary strategies are not appropriate for those with > special needs, anyway. Not claiming to be an ordinary user :) > > > I still find that creating many partitions (I use 8 plus swap) makes for > > easier administration, as long as you plan the partition sizes > > carefully. > > And the last part of your sentence gives it all away, for me. > Planning for future growth is reading crystal balls, sticking > one's finger in the air, taking a WAG, and then later being > wrong after all, and having to repartition. I prefer to have > the computer manage the resources. > > But everyone has his own preferences. Agreed - it took a long time to arrive at partitions I was happy with, and often when one fills up, it is a royal pain moving things around. I've been meaning to try out LVM - it may be the best of both worlds. Cheers, Ben >
