| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
How The Backup Process Has Changed
How The Backup Process Has Changed
Posted Nov 30, 2007 1:33 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)In reply to: How The Backup Process Has Changed by jimparis
Parent article: How The Backup Process Has Changed
You might need to modify it to write its config backups and things somewhere else (preferably make it configurable at runtime). But yes, if you can avoid those problems then that might work, and thanks to tmpfs pretty much everyone has the moral equivalent of a ramdisk within easy reach. (Snapshotting an active swap partition is just barmy. Snapshotting a filesystem containing an active swapfile is careless and risky, but thankfully swapfiles tend to get used only for short-term oh-shit-we-need-another-X-Gb-of-swap-right-now stuff, at least in my experience. They're not something you habitually run with for ages.)
(Log in to post comments)
How The Backup Process Has Changed
Posted Nov 30, 2007 4:56 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
>thankfully swapfiles tend to get used only for short-term oh-shit-we-need-another-X-Gb-of-swap-right-now stuff, at least in my experience. They're not something you habitually run with for ages. Wandering *way* off topic, is there actually any reason we don't all use swap files these days, other than inertia? They certainly allow more flexible on-the-fly configuration of your swap needs, and I'm not aware of any disadvantages. Seems like a desktop distro optimizing for simplest-thing-that-works would be quite sane to just slap a single partition on the hard disk and then allocate a swapfile in it.
How The Backup Process Has Changed
Posted Nov 30, 2007 8:22 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I'd go with inertia too. Splitting up your fs into more than one big lump still has advantages (putting your data somewhere else allows you to blow away the rest more easily: you can hive off filesystems as a whole onto remote storage slightly more easily: it keeps them safe from each other being corrupted to some degree; you can mount them readonly and so on) but IIRC the only advantage of swap partitions these days is that they're guaranteed to be contiguous.