On Tuesday 09 May 2006 10:25 am, Carl Hartung wrote:
Thanks for the feedback. More tools in the kit bag are always nice to have... you never know when you'll need "just that one." I have to admit, though, my enthusiasm is a bit tempered by two factors:
First, these tools introduce the opportunity to skip making backups, which for some people is too great a temptation to resist, particularly when they're inexperienced, too trusting and time is tight. That is system management issue. If you do not make backups, you risk losing your data. It's just that simple.
Secondly, if one does make backups, it isn't very clear to me how much time is saved by moving/resizing versus deleting, recreating and restoring. It might be a wash but the moving/resizing process, itself, introduces another layer of complexity that IMHO increases the odds of something going amiss. That's just a "gut" reflex... maybe I'm wrong. In the olden days before Linus started to use Minix, we did not have these tools. While UFS did not get fragmented like a FAT file system, it could fragment when it was close to being full. The defrag technique was to backup and restore. For the most part, a backup/delete/recreate/restore has some benefits in that you can change the file system. In the case of ReiserFS you can upgrade from 3.5 to 3.6 or to 4.0. Or you can change from ReiserFS to Ext3 or JFS.
In some cases, where I needed to resize the root file system, a backup was
not a good idea. If it gets screwed up, my backup is always the install
media.
--
Jerry Feldman