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Date:      Wed, 7 Feb 2001 18:57:26 -0600 (CST)
From:      Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
To:        Bill Moran <wmoran@mail.iowna.com>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Some conceptional questions about partition size
Message-ID:  <14977.61174.493877.502920@guru.mired.org>
In-Reply-To: <51153511@toto.iv>

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Bill Moran <wmoran@mail.iowna.com> types:
> > As we move now toward a RAID, several aspects shown above become irrelevant/obsolet.
> > So, my question for that is: is it a good task to "melt together" all
> > system's directories together into a big partition, say, mounted as / ?
> The big disadvantage to this is that if something being written to /var
> corrupts the filesystem, you could have an unbootable system. Whereas if
> / and /var are seperate, a corrupt /var filesystem will still allow
> boot, and you can fairly easily rebuild /var and get up and running
> again.

While file system corruption used to be a serious problem, it's pretty
much neglible these days. There are two reasons for this. One is that
the hardware and software are both more reliable and robust than they
used to be. The other is that the cost of a single machine being down
is typically much lower than it used to be.

Of course, the latter isn't always true, but by the time a system is
so critical that having it down a bit longer to dig out the fixit
cdrom is a major problem, it's also so critical that RAID and hot
spares become reasonable alternatives for failure recovery.

These days, the only good reasons to split a file system are
administrative, like these two of yours:

> Another reason I split filesystems is to achieve a simplified quota
> mechanism. 
> I usually split by purpose.

I also split file systems based on the backup strategy I'm using for
them. It's different for things I can recreate from sources or the net
and things I've created or modified locally.

	<mike
--
Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.


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