Hi, On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 06:56:11PM -0400, Default User wrote: > Concerning the points raised:
I still did not see any statement of which concrete problems or issues you did actually want to tackle. For example it is a waste of time people giving advice about the upgrade route if you have decided that you do wish to fix your partitioning by means of a full reinstall. (I'm not telling you that you should fix your partitioning or that you should do a full reinstall. As you say, it's a matter of how much time you have available and what your goals are.) > Fun fact: I use rsync to do backups to and external usb hard drive. If > the external drive is not connected, rsync will, without any notice, > proceed to create a backup directory under /media, with the name of the > unconnected backup drive, and happily copy to it until / is completely > filled up. Annoying, but easily fixed. But with no separate / > partition, it seems to me that could be a real "train wreck". That > seems like one good reason to have a separate / partition. I'm afraid I disagree, for much the same reasons that I disagree with the "but it might full up my whole machine" argument in this context: 1) As you say, it isn't hard to avoid the failure mode you describe. It's a couple of lines of shell script or a more advanced backup solution. The problem is deterministic; you know what causes it and you can take steps to avoid it reliably forever. By contrast it doesn't matter how smart you are, it's very hard to predict future usage. 2) Even if you don't avoid it, and it happens to you, it is as most a slight inconvenience. Delete the files and do the backup again. By contrast juggling N different partitions that fill at different rates is much more awkward and involves gross symlink hacks or periods of downtime where you issue risky repartitioning commands. > 5) I have never used BTRFS or ZFS. Both would require a learning curve > (especially ZFS). I really think I would need much higher capacity > hardware to use ZFS. And I am used to using ext2/3/4. Be it ever so > humble, it "Just Works". (The older I get, the more I appreciate that.) I think that LVM i going to involve the fewest new concepts here as at the end of it you have some block devices which you put ext4 filesystems on as before. Moving to an advanced filesystem would bring more benefits that some people say they can no longer live without, but there is maybe a steeper learning curve and changes that touch many things like how you do backups for example. Thanks, Andy
