[Novalug] Question 1. from File Systems / LVM Talk(s)

[Maxwell Spangler]

On Fri, 2010-07-23 at 15:27 -0400, Roger W. Broseus wrote:

> Now for the questions.
> 
> I dual boot Win-7 / Ubuntu on my Thinkpad. Is there a good reason to LVM it 
> for Linux? (I've got a separate partition for /home.)
> 

Here are two benefits of making your default install filesystems
(/root, /home) as LVM:

1) Snapshots.  Say you're going on a trip and you want to backup
gigabytes of data in /home on your laptop to an external USB drive.
It's going to take 6 hours to do so and you want to do it this morning
before you get on a plane later this evening.  By creating an LVM
snapshot of /home, you could have a new filesystem called
(example) /mnt/home-snapshot that will be a copy of /home frozen in
time.  Continue working in /home while copying the static /home-snapshot
to your external USB drive.  When the copy is done, remove the LVM
snapshot and everything is back to normal.

2) Resizing.  If you configure a drive with LVM, you will be able to
adjust your partitions, adding space/removing space as needed including
adding space on additional physical devices.

LVM can seem complex at first, but once you get the hang of it, it is
truly as good as any other flexible technology you'll see in Linux.

-- 
Maxwell Spangler
========================================================================
        Linux, Unix and Database Administration
        Currently: Boulder, Colorado
        LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwellspangler