I'm installing a 1TB disk into a Slackware 12.2 system. Is there any reason not to format the entire disk with just one huge partition? Would I realize any significant performance or efficiency improvements if I created several smaller partitions on the disk? I'm using it for backup storage only - I back up OS and critical files, web server, etc. from all of my other computers. It's running with an old Sempron 2200 on a socket A motherboard, 768M memory

Typically I would create a 3 partitions: / for the install (as minimal as possible to do whatever job like backup), /swap, and then /data for the actual backup data. On a machine I use for backup, I have like 4GB for a minimal Debian (overkill since it only takes up 1GB of space), 1GB swap, and the rest a large partition for data.

Or better yet, if you have an old drive, use that for / and /swap and then just use the terabyte drive for /data. And depending on what types of files you are backing up, you may want to use a different filesystem for the /data partition. I have a bunch of movies and whatnot stored so I use xfs which handles large file sizes better than ext3.

I have an old 30GB WD drive I use for boot and swap. The TB drive is data only. Most of the stuff going on it is small files, so I left it as ext2. IIRC the size limit for ext2 is 4TB? With TB drives being somewhat new, I wasn't sure how well ext2 would work with these drives, regardless of max size limits.

i wouldnt partition it, if just for data, unless you might consider having an alternate file system for compatibility issues. I got 1TB WD external, it's great.

I think it should work fine, though I'm sure others would be better "tuned" for this application (i.e. lots of smaller files), but ext2/3 are really solid.

BTW, any particular reason for not using ext3? In my (somewhat limited experience), it tends to recover more gracefully from things like power outages...

One-big-partition is fine. I would use ext3/4, though - you don't want to be doing an fsck on a 1TB drive if anything goes the way of the pear, and journalling should eliminate the need for that.

On a more fundamental note, a wise man once said to me: "If it's spinning, it's not a backup". Words to live by.

Dave

I've noticed that sometimes when things go wrong with ext2, the default fsck parms won't fix it, and the box goes into a reboot-fsck-ohcrap_its_broken-reboot cycle until I intervene. Any feelings about using ext4?

Yah - there is always the risk of it going kablooie, but the probability of it doing so just when I need the data is so minimal, I can live with the risk.

I'd go with ext3 for now. ext2 doesn't have journalling, ext3 does. ext4 is still very new. Wait until its the default fs type on a long term OS eg RHEL/Centos.
Always be conservative with backups. And yeah, make a non-spinning backup, pref offsite eg DVD.

I've got my /data on a 320GB ext3 drive. The data is mostly static - dvds etc. Every 30 boots or so it does an automatic fsck and it takes forever! Sure, I could skip the autofsck, boot, and do it manually, but it's still going to take many minutes to make that drive available. If you don't mind the wait, use an ext3. If you don't want to have the occasional boot take 20 minutes (WAG for 1TB) then use xfs. JMO