[mdlug] Completely replacing Windows XP Pro with Linux!

[Jonathan Billings]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:52:18PM -0400, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
> Until the LVM data gets hosed... then it's a nightmare trying to recover
> unless you have really been methodical about doing backups.
> 
> I use LVM in the workplace, *IF* the backups are frequent and shown to
> be reliable (not always a given).  For home use -- not a chance.

I'm going to have to disagree (again) about using LVM.  (We seem to
have this exchange every year or so...)

Good backups is a good idea, no matter what, but recovering LVM is not
as painful as it might have been in the bad old LVM1 days (or with
other logical volume managers).  Several copies of the configuration
is stored on the disk, and typically an archive of the configuration
is stored in /etc/lvm/archive/, if you can get to there.  The kind of
situation that leads to "LVM data gets hosed" will just as easily
overwrite the partition table on a disk, and *that* might be even more
difficult to recover from, since on-disk backups rarely preserve
partition table structures. 

There's many reasons why most distros have moved to using LVM by
default, and none of them chose it because it's trivial to lose data. 

-- 
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>