How The Backup Process Has Changed [LWN.net]

How The Backup Process Has Changed

Posted Nov 30, 2007 4:56 UTC (Fri) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: How The Backup Process Has Changed by nix
Parent article: How The Backup Process Has Changed

>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.

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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.