Tape backups and Disk management

[Leslie Mikesell]

In article <1990Mar2.134004.23530 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:

>For any system, be it system V or BSD, the way to handle this is to make
>root very small so that it only contains required directories (/bin, /etc,
>/lib) and place the rest of the stuff onto other file systems.

I used to do that but quit after a release upgrade wouldn't fit. This was
on 3B2's, somewhere around the transition from SysVr2 to SysVr3r.  Rebuilding
the machines (slow 720K floppies...) took several days each.  I suspect
the same sort of thing will happen when SysVr4 comes around but at least we
have tape drives or network links on everything now.

>This makes your root directory fairly static and therefore reduces, if not
>elimates, any fragmentation.  Another good side effect is that the smaller
>and more static that the root device is, the less likely that you 
>will have file system problems on that partition.

It also means that you have to mount /tmp from another partition if you
want any space there, and you can't share the space between /tmp and
/usr/tmp, and that anything that uses workspace in /tmp has to copy
the finished file back instead of being able to link it into the
/usr filesystem.
 
>If you still need to defragment root, you must make a backup copy, reboot
>the system on another device (floppy for your 386 example) from that 
>device, mkfs, restore, shutdown and reboot.

That's reasonable, but if your new filesystem isn't an exact duplicate
of the old one, you would have to adjust /etc/partitions (anything else??).
Is it possible to bring up RFS when booting from a floppy?

Les Mikesell
  les at chinet.chi.il.us