Re: [Hampshire] Strange overflow messages when backing up

On Friday 02 November 2007 20:26, Andy Smith wrote:
> Also it's a little unusual using an entire disk (/dev/sda) for a
> filesystem instead of just a partition of it (e.g. /dev/sda1).
> Though it should still work.

Yes. It was set up for me by someone who was helping me at a LUG BaB meeting. It works (or rather, has done so far) and I am rather using: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. At least I now have a full backup of /home, which was the main aim; and I have SATA working on an oldish motherboard, which was essential.

> Observations not related to your current problem:
>
> I see you are using LVM so I do wonder why you didn't use /dev/sda
> as an LVM physical volume, extend the volume group into it and get
> your /home as a logical volume then.

Because I didn't know how to?? The SATA disk arrangement had been set up for me as part of a previous install, and I just went on using it. The SATA card I have seems to have the possibility of a RAID, but again, I don't know how to use it. I had a look, but the data is just too precious to me to do too much mucking around with.

> I also see several disk devices in use here but can't see any
> obvious redunancy (software RAID) - something to be concerned about
> unless you're using harwdare RAID.

Neither I nor the chaps helping me knew how to set up a RAID and we couldn't get on-line, so we (he/they) didn't set one up. :-(

When I partitioned hda for the present install, I couldn't persuade Etch to let me have the already existing sda as /home. So in the end I let Etch do an automatic LVM because I thought that that way by the time I needed more space for / I might know how to use LVM to shrink the home partition that Etch had insisted on setting up, and use the space for something else.

I then edited fstab to use the SATA drives.

The sort of arrangement you mention is exactly what I would have liked to set up. Ascribe the present pig's ear to ignorance. :-(

Lisi