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

[gevisz <gevisz@gmail.com>]

2016-09-01 22:12 GMT+03:00 Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>:
> On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:58 PM, gevisz <gevisz@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2016-09-01 14:55 GMT+03:00 Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>:
>>
>>> 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,

Yes, thank you.

> it is easy to move LVM volumes to other drives, re-partition them later,
> and so on.

I still suspect that this extra level of complexity can complicate recovery
of the data, if anything happens to the disk under LVM management (except
for stealing the hard drive, of course :).

>  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).

It is not a question of using the disk with Windows, but I too often see
some reports about problems in using btrfs on this list to try using it
myself...

>>> 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).

No, that data was not backed up.

But I am not guaranteed to be so lucky again, of course. :(

That is why I decided to finally start to back up my data. :)

>  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.

Yes. :)

>  I don't do them as well as ideally I should

Who does? :)

Well, probably, one who just lost a lot of data because of not doing backup. :)

> (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.

Well, thank you for your advices.