On Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:20:57 -0700 Mark Phillips via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:
> In terms of a major reinstall, should I use LVM or not? No, don't use LVM. Just one more abstraction layer to go wrong and bork all your data. It also adds more learning to our already overburdened minds. From my understanding, LVM bestows three advantages: 1) "Rubber" partitions that can grow and shrink. 2) Partition snapshots. 3) Combining multiple hardware disks into one virtual disk. Now, with the advent of bind mounts, rubber partitions are trivial without LVM or any other abstraction layer. You can get pretty close to the utility of snapshots with rsync. If you want real snapshots, just substitute btrfs instead of ext4. Combining multiple hardware disks is often done for the wrong reason. I wish I had a dime for every person trying to combine a 20 year old 20GB drive, a 10 year old 1TB drive, and a current day 16GB drive, just to add 1020GB to a 16,000,000 GB system. Not worth the added complexity of LVM. A better reason is to add in a new 20TB drive after your 16TB drive became full. But still not good enough. The new drive can be carved up into directories to be bind-mounted to mountpoints on the 20GB drive, so LVM is still not necessary. Maybe there's some RAID related reason to use LVM. I wouldn't know because I don't use RAID. If you don't need high availability or error correction, why use RAID. If you DO need high availability or error correction, then you can take everything I've said with a grain of salt, because your use case is different. SteveT Steve Litt Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
