On 01/30/2014 12:28 AM, Sorin Srbu wrote: >>> My (sometimes unpopular) advice is to set up the partitions on servers >>> into two categories: >>> >>> 1) OS >>> 2) Data >> Absolutely. I have been doing this, without problems, for 5 years. >> Keeping the two distinct is best, in my opinion. > Exactly. Why would this be an unpopular piece of advice? > > It might even be better to keep the OS by itself on one disk (with /boot, / > and swap) and have the data on a separate disk. > > Please enlighten me! I think the somewhat unpopular part is to recommend *against* using LVM for the OS partitions, voting instead to KISS, and only use LVM / Btrfs / ZFS for the "data" part. Some people actually think LVM should be used everywhere. And for clarity's sake, I'm not suggesting a literal partition /os and /data, simply that there are areas of the filesystem used to store operating system stuff (EG: /bin, /boot, /usr), and areas used to store data (EG: /home, /var, /tmp), etc. Keep the OS stuff as simple as possible, RAID1 against bare partitions, etc. because when things go south, the last thing you want is *another* thing to worry about. Keep the data part such that you can grow as needed without (much) downtime. EG: LVM+XFS, ZFS, etc. (And please verify your backups regularly) -Ben