"lost" my LVM volume

[Paul Howarth]

Colin Brace wrote:
> On 7/18/06, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
> 
>> What would you use instead? In what way would that survive the loss of a
>> drive?
> 
> Thinking aloud a bit more... what disadvantage would there be to
> ditching LVM and using symlinks instead? That is, one normal partition
> with both files and symlinks to files in other partitions?

The disadvantage is having to maintain the symlinks, and manage the 
allocation of files to the different partitions manually.

> I've been using LVM for more than a year and I find it a nice way to
> manage a large collection of large files. It just seems so
> *vulnerable*, at least the way I have been using it.

Any system that stripes data over multiple drives is going to be 
vulnerable unless extra steps are taken (such as striping over RAID 
mirrors). Looking after your filesystem allocation manually may mean 
that you only lose part of your data in the event of a failure, but you 
still need your backups to recover from, and since you're backing 
everything up anyway, you may as well go for LVM for the manageability 
advantages.

Paul.