[linux-lvm] Manegeability with LVM

[José Luis Domingo López]

On Monday, 04 March 2002, at 23:00:10 +0100,
Anders Widman wrote:

> As my need for diskspace increases all the time I was thinking of
> using LVM so I could make use of all diskspace and grow/shrink/replace
> drives as I need to.
> 
Take into account that there are filesystem that by design doesn't
support shrinking of filessytems (e.g. XFS). Some others allow you to
both grow and shrink filesystems, but sometimes you will have to unmount
the filesystem before modifying its size.

On the LVM part, it was designed to allow growing and reducing LV sizes
without being necessary to put your machine in some "maintenance" state.

> The only downside to this is the possibility of massive dataloss if I
> loose any of the 14 disks (drive fails to spin etc...). Would it be
> possible to setup up a software redundancy like RAID5 with LVM so I
> can keep this manageability LVM gives me?
> 
Remember, nothing except regular _and_ verified backups of your valuable
data can guarantee that your data will survive a hardware _or_ software
error. I'm am not sure what I fear most, a damaged disk or a severe 
filesystem corruption. Some RAID levels give you additional hardware
failure protection, but other levels increase your chances of lossing
data. LVM can be seen as some sort of linear-RAID, and as such, usually
increases the probability of a broken disk destroying your data.

In other words, backups are (and will always be) the way to go.

-- 
José Luis Domingo López
Linux Registered User #189436     Debian Linux Woody (Linux 2.4.18-rc4aa1)
 
jdomingo AT internautas DOT org   =>  Spam at your own risk