[wellylug] Finally going to do it .. only ...

[Richard]

> > > ** How do people partition their large drives and what file systems do
> > > they use?
> 
> about 5 gig for system,
> rest is split into 10 gig pieces for data. separate
> partition for /home
> 
> > I create one single partition eating up all the space, and I use reiserfs (v3 so
> not a good idea - all egs in one backet :) what if you want a total
> upgrade with reformatting ?

The few times I've wanted to do something drastic, it has always been faster to
move everything off to a usb2 external or over the network than to fiddle around
trying to do the partition dance. This is 2004 people, locating temporary space
is not hard unless you're working to a really tight budget. 

As for eggs in one basket, this is always the case with a single drive, and is
why I keep regular backups on a seperate system. If you're trying to keep things
safe by using partitions you're only fooling yourself :) 

The primary rule for me in all things tech related has been, use the simplest
solution possible given the constraints. In ye olde times, multiple partitions
were a necessary evil because:

1. Most unix systems were servers with low tolerance for downtime
2. Bulk storage was expensive and slow
3. Most unix systems had multiple disks
4. We were forever running out of disk space due to logs filling up

Today, for workstations, the opposite is true in every case. You can easily
afford to take your entire workstation down if you're gonna fiddle with your
storage, you can buy 120gb of usb2 external storage for around $250, and for
most of us there's either one disk, or one disk that matters.

As for logs filling up, well, that never happens to me anymore. Everyone just
seemed to learn from it, and it's not like we're talking about filling up 5-10mb
here, filling up 50gb prior to rotation is a whole different ballgame.

> > Always use reiser now.
> I had weird issues with reiser,.. always use ext3 now :)

It has been really solid for me for two years now, most particularly of benefit
because I use maildir for my mail storage, and have 800mb of mail now. ext3
could handle it, but reiser offered a significant boost in usability with mutt.

Only thing I really liked about ext3 was that I could access it with ext2
kernels/bootdisks. Now however that doesn't seem to be an issue. 

-- 
Richard Clark,
Analysis and Design,
Red Spider Ltd.
(+64) 021 478 219