Hey guys, stupid question. My current scheme is traditional partitions on a RAID1 consisting of the old school layout of

/boot
/swap
/
/home

This is on my home video / backup server and I want to do a Nextcloud and that thing REALLY doesn't want it's data dir outside of the main / which doesn't have a ton of room in it so I was gonna backup and repartition using LVM this time. Question is, assuming I more or less copy what I've got now just using LVM and LV's this time does it make any difference when possibly resizing later (this time I'm going to be leaving unallocated space at the end) where or when these are set up? Meaning say I had at 20GB / and then a 100GB /home after it then some unallocated space at the end of the drive. It means nothing that /home is after / right? same question really goes for any of them. My understanding is that with the LV's they can just pick up space and add them to the LV assuming you have it to give at that later date regardless of where it was on the drive right? I know this sounds backwards just having trouble getting around thinking about this in a new way. Would also be keeping my drives on a RAID1 if that changes anything.

Yes, you can just take any available space and add it to an LV and enlarge its filesystem. It's similar to a process requesting more memory, which the kernel can pick up from anywhere and add it to the process's VM space. The difference is that a rotating disk may have to seek over a large distance if a filesystem gets split, for example, on opposite sides of your 100GB /home partition. Fortunately, LVM has a powerful pvmove utility that can rearrange the placement of LVs on disk drives if you do find the need to optimize performance, and it can do that rearrangement while the system remains up and running. The down side is that in order to acomplish that you need to learn more about LVM than you probably wanted to know. AFAIK, there is no simple "defragment" tool for LVM.

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Be sure not confuse partitions on top of a LVM manager scheme. They have to be considered differently I'd suggest. Generally the LVM management makes adding space seamless if you configure it correctly at start.

Your choices tend to be using a partition management scheme like LVM or you can consider using something like ZFS or BtRFS. I assume you mean a local nextcloud instance instead of wan based storage. ??

Thanks, thats what I though just got in my own head about it.

Ya, local setup. I've been trying to get info on ZFS lately I like what I hear about snapshots and it's flexibility but other than hearing good things I've never dealt with it.

All of these advanced ways will require you to brush up on the use. LVM may have more documentation I'd guess.

LVM is the way to go - if you have a current version, it will even do RAID1 without requiring you to mess with mdadm. Very handy when you want to expand the physical space. Also has failure policies so you can have spares and allow it to rebuild automagically on a failure.
Much lower learning curve than zfs or btrfs, and can be added easily to the current setup. Check out the RHEL LVM guide.

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