Colin Brace wrote:
On 7/18/06, Paul Howarth <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What would you use instead? In what way would that survive the loss of a
drive?
Thinking aloud a bit more... what disadvantage would there be to
ditching LVM and using symlinks instead? That is, one normal partition
with both files and symlinks to files in other partitions?
The disadvantage is having to maintain the symlinks, and manage the
allocation of files to the different partitions manually.
I've been using LVM for more than a year and I find it a nice way to
manage a large collection of large files. It just seems so
*vulnerable*, at least the way I have been using it.
Any system that stripes data over multiple drives is going to be
vulnerable unless extra steps are taken (such as striping over RAID
mirrors). Looking after your filesystem allocation manually may mean
that you only lose part of your data in the event of a failure, but you
still need your backups to recover from, and since you're backing
everything up anyway, you may as well go for LVM for the manageability
advantages.
Paul.
