Partition Size

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> Jerry McAllister wrote:
> 
> > This 'rest of the disk' should be divided up into chunks that can
> > be dump(8)ed to one backup media if possible.   Otherwise you will
> > get sloppy and not do backups because it is harder.  Since there is a 
> 
> What kind of nonsense is this?  I've never heard about such an advise, 
> and it doesn't make sense to me.  Surely dumping a filesystem to 
> multiple tapes isn't more, most likely less, effort than dumping n 
> filesystems to one tape each.  The only case this doesn't hold is when 
> you're using amanda, but that's hardly a home setup, and comes with a 
> special backup discipline anyways.  Actually, I doubt that many people 
> use tape backup at home, considering how outrageously expensive the 
> stuff is, and the inexpensiveness of usb disks these days, which are a 
> lot easier to handle than tapes.

Just based on experience with a number of sites who use our systems.
If it gets any more complicated than shoving in one tape and
typing one command, they put it off and don't get around to it
until it generally doesn't get done at all.   Having to come back
and put in another tape and respond to a prompt seems to be something
that makes it too complicated.

It is reasonably easy to create a script that will dump a series of
file systems to single tapes by just having it ask which one to do
each time.    This seems to make more sense to some people, especially
those without much experience (yet) in the process than keeping
track of prompts to put in the next media unit.   Of course a stacker 
is nice.  But, the beginner is not likely to have that.
If you have no problem plugging in a sequence of tapes and keeping track 
of them, then skip the chunking, for sure.

Personally, I prefer to make a much bigger filesystem - even stripe
more than one drive together - except I can't really afford much hardware 
for my personal use right now.  Anyway, it doesn't seem all that complicated 
to me either.  This is just experience with startups and harrassed site
managers talking.   

If you are running a really big server system, then chunking disk space 
to fit backup media would really be a pain.  But, then, someone running 
a really big system is likely to have enough experience to not be 
intimidated by multi-tape or DVD or whatever dumps and also would not be 
asking the questions that the poster did.   Those people would have already 
worked out their stuff and probably are doing something like mirroring or 
raid 5-ing or running a continuous crawl backup process or whatever else 
they think up.

And, if you aren't using tapes, well make it work out well for
whatever you are doing.   Mirrors are not infallible, but then
neither are tapes.   So, choose your poisen and hope the antidote works.

////jerry

> 
> mkb.
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