[QCLUG] Directories as partitions

[Steve Langasek]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 02:08:56PM -0500, Arron Lorenz wrote:
> I not a big fan of having a single point of failure. Gentoo is running on an
> older drive mounted as "/". the newer drive actually houses my data. File
> music/video share is in /home, etc has most conf files, and really the only
> thing i have var on the other drive for is for the web server data. Long
> story short if i have any issues. Probably overkill but hey it gets the job
> done.

Putting part of your data on one drive and part of your data on the other
doesn't save you from having a single point of failure, it gives you *two*
single points of failure, each of which will only eat part of your data but
either of which can still take out your whole system.

Which is not to say there aren't other reasons for splitting your data
between two drives, like, oh, you have two drives and you want to put them
to use instead of shelling out for one bigger one; and there are some
relatively small benefits to creating multiple partitions, because it
reduces the chance that a disk error in your metadata will make all of your
data unreadable; but that doesn't really eliminate the drives as single
points of failure for the system.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/