[ale] to lvm or not lvm is my dillema

[Solomon Peachy]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2026 at 05:27:16PM -0500, Jeff Lightner via Ale wrote:
> I like LVM because it allows one to quickly change layouts without having to
> undo anything.   One can add to an existing LV more easily than to existing
> partitions.   One also doesn't run up against partition boundaries causing
> issues when a new filesystem is needed.   A new LV can be added so long as
> you have space.

Only a few days ago I had the value of LVM on a single drive laptop 
handily demonstrated -- I migrated the contents of a LUKS-encrypted 512G 
drive to a 1TB drive, roughly doubling the sizes of all volumes in the 
process, without having to go through a very time-consuming parition 
realignment.

The longer version:

On xmas eve a precocious youngster knocked a beverage into my open 
laptop bag.  While Thinkpad Ts are tough, they aren't designed to be 
partially submerbed. Magic smoke escaped.  I have nightly backups of 
critical stuff (/etc, /var, /home) but thankfully the old drive survived 
completely unscathed.

/boot/efi (vfat) and /boot (ext4) were "classic" partitions; I doubled 
their size when creating the new partitions, dumped them over.  the 
former was resized. Then I dumped the LVM PV over, and rebooted from the 
live USB stick into the restored system.  From there I grew the PV to 
fill the rest of the disk, doubled the size of /'s LV, had /home use the 
remaining space, and live-resized /, /boot, and /home.

From powering on the new system to being right where I left off took 
less than an hour, including data transfer -- dd sustained 1.1GB/s, 
limited by the NVMe<>USB dongle I was using.  That broke my brain a 
bit...

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy			      pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
                                      @pizza:shaftnet dot org   (matrix)
Dowling Park, FL                      speachy (libera.chat)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20260102/d9c55550/attachment.sig>