How to find disk slice layout

Jerry McAllister jerrymc at msu.edu
Tue May 29 01:49:44 UTC 2007


On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 10:38:41AM -0500, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:

> On May 28, 2007, at 9:53 AM, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> 
> >On Sun, May 27, 2007 at 10:34:52PM -0500, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
> >
> >>Is there some
> >>command I can use to remind me of how I sliced that partition?
> >
> >I am guessing that you have your terminology scrambled,
> 
> You guessed correctly.  I should have asked to see how I "partitioned  
> that slice" instead of "sliced that partition".   Once I realized my  
> error, it became clear that I needed to ask bsdlabel about a slice  
> and so
> 
>   bsdlabel /dev/ad0s1
> 
> would have been the correct command (while I had incorrectly been  
> trying it on /dev/ad0)

Could just say baslabel ad0s1.   IT will add any necessary /dev/ and
other stuff (if any).

> >Note you do not back up the swap partition which is normally 'b'
> >and don't do anything to the 'c' partition which is there only to
> >describe the slice to the system and is not a true partition.
> >You can probably skip backing up your /tmp also.
> 
> What about /dev and /var?

Not /dev.   That must be part of / and not its own file system.

If /var is its own partition/file system, then you might want to
back it up.    It can possibly contain databases and such and
thus be valuable.   But, that is for you to determine the need.
Some people leave /var as part of / or put it in another filesystem
with a symbolic link.  In that case you wouldn't back up /var separately.
Of course, then it would not show up in 'df' output either.

> I'm willing to lose the log files in /var/log if it comes to it, and  
> I don't have local mail delivery or much important that would be in  
> out-going mail queues.

Well, check for stuff in /var/db and /var/share and make sure there is
nothing worth keeping.  Then, it's up to you.   You might have to
recreate some files with touch to make logs and other things work
if you loose things and have to rebuild.

> I also feel that I should have put /usr/ports/distfiles on another  
> file system, since I don't particularly care to back up those  
> either.  I guess I could just put in a symbolic link to something on / 
> var

That is up to you.  I generally make a large /home or sometimes /work
file system and put things that might change size more than planned
including user home directories, /var/log, all of /usr/ports and some
other things in it and make symbolic links.   It is one way to manage
file systems and dumps.

> Again, thank you.

Sure,  Enjoy,

////jerry

> 
> -j
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
> 


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