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Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 12:10:27 +0100
From: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com>
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To: Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@tensor.3miasto.net>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Resizing /var (maybe off topic)
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Wojciech Puchar wrote:

>
> i'm using different unices for 7 years and excluding few cases i never 
> made other partitioning scheme than 2 partitions: swap and /
>
> i have no problems like "there's out of space in partition x while 
> plenty of y".
> it's far easier to do backups too (single dump).

If it works for you, that's fine -- do it.  It doesn't work for me because:

1) Runaway processes, idiot users and misconfiguration errors can and do 
fill disks.  I have experienced this recently on a Linux box (usually 
stupid two partition scheme of / and /boot) where valuable data was lost 
when a disk filled.  Had stuff been partitioned better, no valuable data 
need have been lost.

2) If you have one partition then you are forced to use the same backup 
scheme for everything.  I don't much care about backing up /, /usr, /var 
or even /usr/local because almost everything on those partitions is 
re-created pretty easily just by re-installing.  Any machine sensitive 
data can have master copies on e.g. /home which I can back up daily.

3) Disk drive capacities have grown much faster than tape drive 
capacities.  With partitioned disks I can fit dumps of single partitions 
on a single tape which makes tape management much easier.

--Alex