On 09/14/2011 01:28 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
With HDs so large as they are any more it borders on incompetence to not have multiple / partitions, a first, a next, and a 3rd or more for experimental. The first is just that, the first OS installed. Then at "upgrade" time, install the "upgrade" to the "next" partition, leaving the first undisturbed. Only after "next" is confirmed suitable do you "convert" it to main, which first immediately before was, and after which first becomes an online backup until next2 becomes available. Meanwhile a third or more are available for testing devel version(s) and/or other distros. In this scenario, /home and other user data partitions, if any, are separate, and mountable as such under any / you have booted. Some care must be taken about user data to prevent corruption switching among non-matching versions of software under the various installed versions of OS, but this is not difficult.
My two RAID1 systems have 3 OS / md devices each, one md device for /tmp, one md device for /home, and couple of other md devices for other data. /boot I don't make into RAID because I see little point. I clone (then set a new UUID and label) the /boot from the #1 HD to the #2 so that it can readily be used as a sole boot device in case the #1 HD dies. I use labels for devices in menu.lst and fstab, which are a bit easier for human eyes to maintain than device ID or UUID.
I have eSATA HDs for backing up, which are only powered at backup times, but much faster at transferring data than USB 2.0.
This discussion is very good and is giving me some ideas. I can see the value of having multiple roots, and I would like to move to that eventually. I followed Felix's advice and did that on my laptop, but when I set up this desktop I had not yet thought about that. So here is a question about multiple roots - when setting up 2 or 3 20gb root partitions for future experimentation, do those partitions have to be primary partitions? Also, do the root partitions have to be next to the swap and next to the /home partition, or can they be anywhere on the drive? Suppose I setup my TB drive so that it is like this: /dev/sdb1 2gb, linux swap to be copied from /dev/sda1 as RAID or with rsync /dev/sdb2 20gb, root partition be copied from /dev/sda2 as RAID or with rsync /dev/sdb3 443.75gb, data partition, copied from /dev/sda3 as RAID or with rsync /dev/sdb4 extended partition covering the next set of partitions /dev/sdb5 20gb, root partition for later use and experimentation (will I be able to point grub to this partition on another day if I install another system to test?) /dev/sdb6 20gb, root partition for later use and experimentation /dev/sdb7 remaining gb on the disk for extra data storage that will be backed up separately Is that a scheme that would work, and would give me the flexibility of being able to install the next upgrade in a different root to test it, and things like that? Thanks again, George -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org