Re: Formatting external HDD
Hi Lisi,
Am Dienstag, 18. Oktober 2011 schrieb Lisi:
> I have just acquired a one T HDD for use as an external HDD. I now
> need to decide how to partition it. I am intending to use it for
> backup purposes, and have bought what seems ot me ot be a very large
> disk so that things can be added or grow.
>
> I want flexibility, but am not well enough informed to use an LVM.
Its easy enough, but annoying that you should do vgchange -an before
removing the drive. Thats fine for permanent disks but annoying for
removable ones. Thus I reformatted my 2,5 inch additional data drive for
my laptop with partitions again. For the backup drives I still use LVM.
> Moreover, I understand that with new HDDs one has to worry about
> partition boundaries, and again, I am not well enough informed to be
> able to achieve this, and anyhow I don't know how big the partitions
> will need to be, nor even what partitions I shall need.
Use fdisk -c -u /dev/yourdrive (since Squeeze) and it aligns to 1 MiB
boundaries which are good enough for all cases. It might be a bit of a
waste, but with one TB IMHO it does not matter.
> Would it be feasible ot have one large partition on the drive, and then
> use directories rather than partitions for the different back-ups?
> Could I do this with cp (obviously), dd, rsync, Clonezilla, or even
> something I don't know about yet? Would this be a reasonable plan?
For one TB that sounds fine, only thing is that fsck times will be higher
for one big partitions.
> And what filing system? I am currently using ext 3, but ma about to
> reinstall and may well use ext 4, if it is available for Lenny.
With Squeeze and up I suggest Ext4. Its stable from all what I can tell.
Ciao,
--
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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