F21 partitioning circus

[Andrew R Paterson]

On Monday 23 February 2015 14:03:17 Chris Murphy wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 2:10 AM, Andrew R Paterson
> 
> <andy.paterson at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > I have to say I find this disucssion interesting....
> > I have spent what amounts to a small fortune (for me!) making sure that
> > when I upgrade from one version of LINUX to another (initially slackware
> > but so far fedora  9 - 20) that I can minimise the risk of (anaconda or
> > whatever the current installer might be) deciding in its wisdom whilst
> > doing the partitioning that it thinks best, blowing away my /opt and/home
> > partitions -
> It's comments like this that make me want to grab a metal bucket, put
> it on my head, and start hitting myself with a mallet.
> 
> To delete and existing /opt or /home requires explicit user
> intervention for this to happen. It doesn't happen by itself. You have
> to a.) click the mount point, b.) click the minus (-) button to
> indicate you want it removed, and c.) the installer produces a dialog
> indicating it's going to be deleted, along with a cancel button, and
> d.) the installer produces a summary of changes at the very end of the
> Manual Partitioning process THAT FUCKING HIGHLIGHTS THIS SHIT IN RED
> LETTERS  indicating it will be deleted.
> 
> So what is it *EXACTLY* that you're experiencing? And what is it
> *EXACTLY* you think you should experience instead? If you can't do
> that, please stop offering opinions about how you need to minimize
> risk due to the installer. This the compsci equivalent of
> hypochondria...
> 
> > which have nearly 20 years of accumulated digital clutter!
> 
> And you have backups right? Because by definition it's not important
> unless you have backups.

Points taken :) :o and apologies where needed.
But maybe the problem is that not many people install/reinstall/fedup often 
enough to get familiar with it.
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!
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.
The thought of trying to back up 300GB using hmmm! a dvd drive! persuades me 
I'd rather live with a RAID 1 setup and occasionally take one of the mirrors 
off and replace it with a new disk - preserving the old disk mirror as my 
"backup".
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! 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!
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!
Andy