On Sat, 2009-03-21 at 14:13 -0700, BRM wrote: > With all the words of LVM2 going on, I feel it is only appropriate to also > mention the risk. > > On a desktop I had installed LVM2 considering that I did need to upgrade > partitions every now and then and my previous solution was add another > drive/partition and cross mount - e.g. like done with /usr/local under /usr, > which worked fairly well. LVM2 worked great - until one of the drives crashed > and I was trying to figure out what was on it. From that pov, volume > management is a pain. I did figure out what I had mounted to it - but only > after deconstructing the LVM configuration file to match it up with what I > had put there. (And no, I had not yet gotten to doing an LVM soft-RAID > solution to map a single LVM partition to two drives, which would certainly > have helped.) I got my system working by adding a new drive that was not > part of the volume group, and removing the old drives from the volume group. > Fortunately, I had my volume setup so that they one partition was not made up > of non-overlaping partitions on different drives. (e.g. partition A = > sda1 + sda2 instead of sda1 + sdb1.) > > So, unless you are looking to use LVM in a soft-RAID solution between > multiple physical drives, not multiple partitions on the same drive, (e.g. > partition A = sda1 + sda2, with mirror on sdb1+sdb2), then I would not > suggest it as should anything happen, it'll make data recovery that much > harder. > > Just 2 cents for the pot.
With or without LVM if you lose a drive then you've lost the data on it. LVM does have the capability of assembling a partially damaged volume group just not a partially damaged logical volume which, when you think about it, makes sense. And you can also throw in the standard warning about backing up your data.
