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The Power Of LVM
Posted by isecore on August 4th, 2008
Today I learned to respect LVM. LVM stands for Logical Volume Management and is a very powerful way of linking harddrives together in groups and treating them like one.
One of my main frustrations with LVM is that it’s very easy to add drives and extend a volume group, but it’s very difficult to remove drives from the same without somehow messing things up. Today I almost messed up enough to wipe my entire root-LVM on my main machine.
Had I not somehow (don’t ask me how, I’m fuzzy on the details) managed to restore it I would’ve lost my entire digital life. My pictures I’ve created, stuff I’ve written, my email - all the lovely cruft I’ve collected over the years in front of the computer.
So, note to self: next time read the goddamn instructions. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t read lame-ass howto’s that do stuff in the wrong order. Don’t do this while slow-headed after a big meal.
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August 4th, 2008 at 17:29
Uhm, a better note to self: Backup the whole damn drive in two complete copies. And do it often.
People think I am mad because I make a complete copy of my /andreas folder (where I have just about all my files - half of my life!) and all my websites in two separate copies each month. They ask me if I have ever needed to restore one of the copies, and I still haven’t needed it. But unlike them, I know that when I need it - it will be there. And if the backup copy fails or gets lost, there is a backup of the backup as well.
It will be worth the effort, some day.
August 4th, 2008 at 20:36
This incident has caused me to once again reconsider my shoddy routines of backup. I try to back up regularly, but it’s too much work to burn everything to DVDs (since there will be several) each week or month or whatever. I’m leaning towards investing in an external drive and using it exclusively for backup.
August 6th, 2008 at 02:48
Im thinking about the same thing. I have a lot of stuff I have made during the years. I have made backups actually, but I recently discovered that the backup-discs are unreadable. Quite scary, what should I make a backup to when CD/DVD evidently doesn’t cut it?
August 6th, 2008 at 11:19
CD/DVD are cheap and fairly durable in most cases. They do get scratched rather easily and just like floppies the quality in later years really can’t stand up to closer inspection. They’ve become like hamburgers - cheap, easy and filling for the moment but have very little in common quality-wise to what they once were.
I’m more into buying an external harddrive and keeping things separate. Making some kind of once-a-week backup routine and simply copy the latest revision of my stuff to it. The Western Digital Mybook series of drives seem to fit the bill perfectly.
August 7th, 2008 at 20:03
I have a MyBook drive from the first “essential edition” series, a 250 gb drive used only for backups. But I can’t trust a single harddrive to work when it is absolutely needed so I have secondary backups in other formats. Some files (about 20gb) are stored on my iPod, other stuff is backed up on a 16gb Corsair USB stick. I also have a set of burned DVDs stored on another location in case the house would explode, but burning DVD’s is not too fun on an old laptop with a slow burner so I mostly use that for keeping backups of websites and documents that are updated often such as my personal diary, template/theme code and recent photo albums.
Anyway, the whole point was that the MyBook is something I can personally recommend. Not that I have needed to restore any backup yet, but it works well so far.
August 7th, 2008 at 22:55
I invested in an external harddrive today. 500 gigabytes, should be enough for the foreseeable future. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it’s a Maxtor (since the store was out of stock on the WDC’s) but I figure I’ll give it a go since the Maxtors in my server have proven very tough and reliable - odd considering the mostly bad experiences I’ve had with Maxtor in the past.