On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:54:32 +0100, Lisi<lisi.reisz@gmail.com> said:
L> I have just acquired a one T HDD for use as an external HDD. I now need
L> to decide how to partition it. [...] Would it be feasible to have one
L> large partition on the drive, and then use directories rather than
L> partitions for the different back-ups?
Yes. I've been using 1.5Tb Seagate drives for a backup server, and they
work fine with one large or two smaller partitions:
Filesystem 1M-blocks Inodes Mounted
/dev/sda2 1372701 362774528 /data1
/dev/sdb6 699594 11216896 /data2
/dev/sdb7 699601 11216896 /data3
I used "mkfs.ext3 -J size=400 -i 65536 -m 2" when creating the sdb
filesystems, which gave me an extra 27Gb by creating one inode per 64K
and only reserving 2% for overflow. I get better performance by using
the deadline scheduler and setting vm.swappiness = 10.
L> Could I do this with cp (obviously), dd, rsync, Clonezilla, or even
L> something I don't know about yet?
Sure, cp for the initial copy and then rsync for changes.
L> And what filing system? [...] My box is ill, possibly unto death.
In that case, now's not the time to experiment. Use something familiar,
and play around *after* your stuff is safely backed up.