Re: Can partitions span more than one drive?
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 04:56:03PM +0300, Nikos Vassiliadis typed: RW wrote: On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:45:47 -0400 John Almberg jalmb...@identry.com wrote: Question: is it possible to just expand my existing /backup partition to encompass both the current drive and the new drive? I'm guessing not, since Chapter 8 in Absolute FreeBSD says that a partition is part of a slice, You can join 2 partitions into 1 with gconcat. OTOH that would wipe any existing data as you would need to put a new filesystem on the combined partition. No, you can always use growfs to expand the filesystem. But of course, the usual warnings apply, read carefully the growfs manual... You can not use growfs to expand a gconcat provider to the new gconcat device. Ruben ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Can partitions span more than one drive?
Ruben de Groot wrote: On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 04:56:03PM +0300, Nikos Vassiliadis typed: RW wrote: On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:45:47 -0400 John Almberg jalmb...@identry.com wrote: Question: is it possible to just expand my existing /backup partition to encompass both the current drive and the new drive? I'm guessing not, since Chapter 8 in Absolute FreeBSD says that a partition is part of a slice, You can join 2 partitions into 1 with gconcat. OTOH that would wipe any existing data as you would need to put a new filesystem on the combined partition. No, you can always use growfs to expand the filesystem. But of course, the usual warnings apply, read carefully the growfs manual... You can not use growfs to expand a gconcat provider to the new gconcat device. What I mean is: 1) you have a filesystem on device A and a spare disk device B 2) concatenate A and B using gconcat 3) growfs the fs in the concatenated device and you are done. Nikos ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Can partitions span more than one drive?
Now that I've got my rsnapshot backup server working beautifully, backing up several servers to a central backup server (I like this a lot), I have a problem... I built my backup server from a machine I had lying around. It has two 140G hard drives. I dedicated one drive to a /backup partition. Unfortunately, that is now running at 88% capacity... i.e., only 16G left... Now that I know this approach is going to work, I'm going to run out and buy a big drive. Question: is it possible to just expand my existing /backup partition to encompass both the current drive and the new drive? I'm guessing not, since Chapter 8 in Absolute FreeBSD says that a partition is part of a slice, which is part of a physical drive, but maybe some bright person has come up with an app that overcomes that limitation. Thanks: John ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Can partitions span more than one drive?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 John Almberg wrote: Now that I've got my rsnapshot backup server working beautifully, backing up several servers to a central backup server (I like this a lot), I have a problem... I built my backup server from a machine I had lying around. It has two 140G hard drives. I dedicated one drive to a /backup partition. Unfortunately, that is now running at 88% capacity... i.e., only 16G left... Now that I know this approach is going to work, I'm going to run out and buy a big drive. Question: is it possible to just expand my existing /backup partition to encompass both the current drive and the new drive? I'm guessing not, since Chapter 8 in Absolute FreeBSD says that a partition is part of a slice, which is part of a physical drive, but maybe some bright person has come up with an app that overcomes that limitation. Thanks: John Hi John, I haven't done much with any of these solutions yet, but I think each one can do what you want, with various pros/cons: Vinum: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/vinum-vinum.html RAID0 striping: http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/RAID0,_Software,_How_to_setup ZFS: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/filesystems-zfs.html Hope that helps get you started, Greg - -- Greg Larkin http://www.FreeBSD.org/ - The Power To Serve http://www.sourcehosting.net/ - Ready. Set. Code. http://twitter.com/sourcehosting/ - Follow me, follow you -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iD8DBQFKlTNy0sRouByUApARAuIfAKCSSxrcZxS7t4U1dZZOdZ6Taoxs8gCgrLrC BFLKz7VNBHEYTpoTQ25jnm8= =pM8t -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Can partitions span more than one drive?
RW wrote: On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:45:47 -0400 John Almberg jalmb...@identry.com wrote: Question: is it possible to just expand my existing /backup partition to encompass both the current drive and the new drive? I'm guessing not, since Chapter 8 in Absolute FreeBSD says that a partition is part of a slice, You can join 2 partitions into 1 with gconcat. OTOH that would wipe any existing data as you would need to put a new filesystem on the combined partition. No, you can always use growfs to expand the filesystem. But of course, the usual warnings apply, read carefully the growfs manual... Nikos ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Can partitions span more than one drive?
On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:45:47 -0400 John Almberg jalmb...@identry.com wrote: Question: is it possible to just expand my existing /backup partition to encompass both the current drive and the new drive? I'm guessing not, since Chapter 8 in Absolute FreeBSD says that a partition is part of a slice, You can join 2 partitions into 1 with gconcat. OTOH that would wipe any existing data as you would need to put a new filesystem on the combined partition. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Can partitions span more than one drive?
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 08:45:47AM -0400, John Almberg wrote: Question: is it possible to just expand my existing /backup partition to encompass both the current drive and the new drive? I'm guessing not, since Chapter 8 in Absolute FreeBSD says that a partition is part of a slice, which is part of a physical drive, but maybe some bright person has come up with an app that overcomes that limitation. You could use gconcat, but you'd have to partition, label and newfs this new combined device which would render your current data unreadable. And on a concatenated disk the risk of failure is increased. If one of the two drives dies, you'll lose all data. If you want to combine disks, use some form of RAID to protect yourself from a dying disk. :-) Roland -- R.F.Smith http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/ [plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated] pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914 B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725) pgppeqDozSi8w.pgp Description: PGP signature
