F21 partitioning circus

[Andrew R Paterson]

On Monday 23 February 2015 15:45:26 Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:54 PM, Andrew R Paterson
> 
> <andy.paterson at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > But maybe the problem is that not many people install/reinstall/fedup
> > often
> > enough to get familiar with it.
> 
> Nor should they. Therein lies a huge reason for why I think the scope
> is just too extreme when they either have to become familiar with its
> idiosyncrasies, or read a bunch of documentation.
> 
> fedup should get better, although I don't know the time frame.  One of
> the ideas floated is to make major upgrades show up in Gnome-Software
> just like offline updates do which already leverages systemd.
> 
> And eventually I'd like to see the default installations be a handful
> of use cases but under neath it all it's a stateless installation that
> permits easy resets, and atomic updates.
> 
> > So I simply make sure I avoid the problem.
> > The thought of risking "mucking it up" after being bitten just once (maybe
> > in the distant past) still makes me do an "Upgrade" the way I do by a
> > reinstall but requiring my own /home and other "partitions". Because
> > these are on separate disks these filesystems are kept securely offline
> > till the install (upgrade) is complete - then I manually add them -
> > anyone else wanting to be really sure they have control of an "upgrade"
> > would be sensible in doing the same thing!
> 
> No they should test this and try to break it and if they can break it
> file a bug so that we can all trust the installer, rather than
> suggesting ways to avoid making things better and more trustworthy.
> 
> > I am sure the existing anaconda will allow me to do this - but it
> > irritates me that some people think it shouldn't - and like I say I don't
> > upgrade often enough to be confident and sure.
> 
> I've done dozens of /home reuse. It even includes /home on a Btrfs
> subvolume, which is on a volume that / is also going to be created
> which normally mandates a reformat which might suggest /home gets
> obliterated, but the installer instead creates a new subvolume for /
> instead of reformatting, and reuses the existing /home.
> 
> > So I'm afraid I want to preserve my filesystems (and their partitioning)
> > and NO - I don't have backups! - and you wont persuade me to take any
> > either - I would spend all day doing backups - and please don't give me
> > another lecture on the subject - I have set up bacula on a large network
> > blah!
> 
> You hate your data. You want it gone. You're just unwilling to do it
> directly yourself, so instead you're being passive aggressive with it.
> 
> > and done script
> > systems using dump/restore and found that its a full time job which
> > introduces new risks that pretty well counter the benefits - Unless you
> > are talking about enterprise systems!
> 
> OK add the lack of a really good backup and restore to the list of
> consequences everyone suffers from, by everyone demanding their
> obscure layout be supported. These arbitrary layouts, rather than
> standardization, is impossible to restore correctly without human
> intervention or very expensive (development knowledge and time and
> testing) backup restore software.
> 
> > Neurotic I might be, but that's the way I do an "upgrade" because I don't
> > trust the installer - yum upgrade - fedup or whatever its next incarnation
> > might be!
> 
> Well as yet not neurotic enough if you aren't doing backups, yet so
> worried about your /home data you think it's going to be the installer
> that nukes it.

Hang on there Chris, (new thread really)
why do you think using a mirror as a backup is a bad idea?
After all its a bit like a database checkpoint.
What is the benefit of a full backup against simply taking a mirror offline and 
replacing it with a new mirror and resyncing - without I might add taking my 
system down? 
As opposed to taking your box offline, and doing a level 0 backup to another 
disk - you end up with a serial backup which must be parsed - I end up with a 
filesystem that I can mount?
To me this is one of the benefits of mirroring - I can mount one of my old 
detached mirrors somewhere else and get at my old data.
That's aside from the lower risk of losing the data in the first place.
I don't particularily need to archive data - just preserve it.
I think you will find this idea is becoming more common these days.
So please give some good reasons for archive (backup) better than checkpoint 
(detached mirror)??
Andy