On Sat September 28 2024 18:18:19 dep via tde-users wrote: > So: can LVM be added to an existing system, or is it like RAID, which needs > to be installed from the get go? LVM uses hard drive partitions. They can be of any size. An LVM partition can contain many filesystems. A single filesystem or even a single file can be bigger than a single LVM partition. (I am deliberately deferring LVM terminology until the last paragraph below.) But you can't normally share a single partition between both LVM and regular storage. If you have a spare partition or can make a spare partition then you can give that partition to LVM and start moving stuff into LVM. Basically the more partitions you have and the more free space you have the easier things will be. I generally divide my hard drives into four to eight partitions for flexibility. But if your hard drive is nearly full you're going to find it hard to make a spare partition to add LVM to an existing system. If I need some software RAID-1 I generally make the RAID out of hard drive partitions and then give the RAID to LVM, rather than giving those partitions to LVM and then trying to make a RAID inside LVM. I may for example have the source code I'm working on in a RAID but my steam downloads not in a RAID. Ideally you'd want your root filesystem inside LVM but I often end up with my root outside LVM for $reasons - I forgot to do it during the original setup or it would have been a pain to do it while converting a laptop mixed Windows and Linux to all Linux or else the configuration tool for a cheap VPS didn't want to play ball. LVM terminology is that a hard drive partition is formatted for LVM making it a "physical volume", one or more physical volumes make a "volume group", and you create filesystems as "logical volumes" in a particular volume group. For example I may make volume groups for RAID or non-RAID storage, or for slow spinning rust and fast SSD storage. On my main backup server I have separate volume groups for each of three physical hard drives so I can control which of my backup logical volumes resides on which physical hard drive. --Mike ____________________________________________________ tde-users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Web mail archive available at https://mail.trinitydesktop.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
