[mythtv-users] An LVM'd drive died! What do I do...

[Andrew Close]

On 10/27/05, Brandon Beattie <brandon+myth at linuxis.us> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2005 at 02:42:15PM -0500, Andrew Close wrote:
> > On 10/27/05, Brandon Beattie <brandon+myth at linuxis.us> wrote:
> > <snip/>
> > > Hopefully in the next few months myth will support storing to multiple
> > > directories, which would remove the need for LVM or having to worry
> > > about losing anything but what was on that drive.
> >
> > excellent thread! :)  i had to come back to the above statement
> > because i've seen it mentioned before and am just looking for a little
> > clarity.
> >
> > storing to multiple directories - what is meant by that?
> > do you want to store all your Lost episodes in /myth/tv/Lost, and all
> > of your SG-1 episodes in /myth/tv/SG-1?  so you have subdirectories
> > under /myth/tv.
> >
> > or do you mean breaking outthe directories into their own partitions -
> > /dev/hdb1 = /myth/tv/Lost
> > /dev/hdb2 = /myth/tv/SG-1
> >
> > you can kind of do this now, can't you?  without the subdirectories -
> > /dev/hdb1 = /myth/tv
> > /dev/hdb2 = /myth/video
> > etc...
>
> There have been a number of ways proposed.  My current thought of the
> "best" is to allow you to create "storage groups".  You can add
> directories to a storage group and list how much space in MB (or how
> much to leave free on that directories partition).  When you record a TV
> show you can have it save it to the general storage group, or have it
> save it to a specific one.
>
> The difficulty in any mutliple directory approach is what happens when
> you have 5 GB free in this directory, 20GB free in another, and 500K in
> another.  Do we split up video streams, do we move files between them,
> and so on.  a 4 hour HD show that's 36GB can be tricky.  If you had 6
> drives and anywhere from 5GB to 20GB free, which do you store to?  Add
> in auto-expire and it gets even more tricky.

please forgive my ignorance of the Linux filesystem, but i thought
that if you had a directory, /myth for example, that the directories
in it would shrink and grow accordingly unless you set them to
particular partitions.  so /myth is on a 300GB partition and it
contains /myth/tv.  /myth/tv will grow as long as there is room on the
partition.
i'm guessing that shrinking is the problem since that's been mentioned
with XFS and JFS...
so my /myth/tv directory will grow to 200GB and then i decide to
delete all my content.  but with XFS /myth/tv is still 200GB in size
even though it is empty?  so if i want to add my dvd collection i've
only got ~50GB of space left even though i've deleted all the content
in /myth/tv..?
if this is the case then i guess one of my scenarios would still work,
but it would use space rather inefficiently.
maybe we need to bug IBM into making XFS (that's theirs right?) shrinkable. :)

cool stuff.  it's funny how the more you play with your setup the more
crazy ideas you get and the more stuff there appears to be done!