I've been using Debian Linux as a Samba file server now for almost four years. It has been damn reliable and I'm quite happy I made the switch from Server 2K, even though I was a little leery at first of putting all my digital photos on a system I did not have much experience managing. I managed plenty of Windows file servers at work. After I initially set it up, I got really busy with school and I did not have much time to tinker with it and I practically forgot all my Linux knowledge.

Now that I'm done with school, I can continue my Linux education. Since I've had this server running continuously for almost four years, I am preparing for hard drive failures by proactively replacing them before they happen. I have aggressive backup procedures in place to protect my data. I've been backing up to optical drive via my Windows client, HISSS I know but I was really busy with school, and the software Retrospect. The software features multi-drive spanning, which saves lots of time when backing up 94GB of data. I also do daily encrypted TAR backups of my data in /home to a separate drive within the computer which is removable. I have several of them which I rotate and keep one off site at my work place. I also perform an rdiff-backup every other hour to another separate drive within the server which is not removable.

Most of my questions here will revolve around Linux as a file server and data backup/protection. I am currently researching the replacement of my system drive or a method of mirroring my system drive, because I don't want the downtime and inconvenience of rebuilding the system. I apologize in advance for my crude terminology. I'll read up as time permits.

Thanks,

ramgarjun

Dear ramgarjun,
what questions?

My first post was meant to be an introduction. I apologize for not stating this clearer.

As I tinker and learn, the questions will come. One immediate question is, what is the purpose and benefit to formatting a hard drive with reiserfs with the -f option and eliminating all partitions? I've done this on my removable drive.

I mount /removable to /dev/hdb and it works fine for my encrypted tar backups, other than having to modify my fstab file to eliminate references to partition numbers. Googling words like "partition-less", "format", "Linux", "hard drive", and "reiserfs" seems to refer to something different from what I have done, like installing Linux over Windows.

Could someone point me in the right direction with the correct terminology and a brief response if you happen to know the answer to this question.

Thank you,

Ramgarjun

I think there's a misunderstanding happening here.

mkreiserfs will by default *not* format a raw-device because it's
an unusual thing to do. -f will allow you to FORCE a format. There's
no benefit to this as far as I'm aware.



Cheers,
Tink

Ok, then I won't do it again. I experimented on the removable since all data will eventually be erased as I rotate them back in, so I'll just repartition, reformat, and reconfigure fstab before letting my backup jobs run.

Thanks for the response Tink,

Ramgarjun