[9fans] mounting fossil

[Peter A. Cejchan]

Hi, niners!

I have an IDE HD with fossil (no venti) partition on it. It contains some
data precious to me.
I would like to mount it on a native Plan9; yes, I've RTFM, but it seems to
me too brief for me to avoid (fatal) mistakes.
Thus, could some nice person lead me step - by - step?

Thanks, besr,
++pac

[David du Colombier]

Post by Peter A. Cejchan
I have an IDE HD with fossil (no venti) partition on it. It contains some
data precious to me.
I would like to mount it on a native Plan9; yes, I've RTFM, but it seems to
me too brief for me to avoid (fatal) mistakes.
Thus, could some nice person lead me step - by - step?

Let's say your disk is named sdE1 and have a Plan 9 partition named "fossil".

% fossil/fossil -m 20 -f /dev/sdE1/fossil -c 'srv -AWPV fossil.other'
-c 'srv -p fscons.other'

Then, you can mount it:

% mount /srv/fossil.other /n/fossil

And to halt it:

% echo fsys all sync >>/srv/fscons.other
% echo fsys all halt >>/srv/fscons.other

[a***@9srv.net]

// I have an IDE HD with fossil (no venti) partition on it.
// It contains some data precious to me.

David's already provided good instructions on dealing with your
immediate problem, but allow me to take a step back:

Don't do that!

Fossil, without venti, is not the stablest thing around. I would very
strongly recommend against putting precious data on it. I've had it
go wonky personally, and there've been plenty of similar reports
here. In my experience, it's particularly vulnerable to unclean
shutdown, but I've seen more difficult-to-explain issues, too.

With venti, it's great: the snapshotting capabilties are very nice,
venti's very solid, and if your fossil does get out of whack, it's trivial
to re-initialize it from a known-good state from venti.

Anthony

[Peter A. Cejchan]

Thanks for warning!
However, I reorganize my data very often, moving between dirs, renaming,
reorganising tree structure...
How will Venti cope with this?

Fopr now, I plan to put the data onto an ext2 partition for now, until I
feel the dir tree is well-designed.
I just want to mount the fossil partition and copy the data out of there.

Thanks, best,
++pac

Post by a***@9srv.net
// I have an IDE HD with fossil (no venti) partition on it.
// It contains some data precious to me.
David's already provided good instructions on dealing with your
Don't do that!
Fossil, without venti, is not the stablest thing around. I would very
strongly recommend against putting precious data on it. I've had it
go wonky personally, and there've been plenty of similar reports
here. In my experience, it's particularly vulnerable to unclean
shutdown, but I've seen more difficult-to-explain issues, too.
With venti, it's great: the snapshotting capabilties are very nice,
venti's very solid, and if your fossil does get out of whack, it's trivial
to re-initialize it from a known-good state from venti.
Anthony

[a***@9srv.net]

Post by Peter A. Cejchan
I reorganize my data very often, moving between dirs, renaming,
reorganising tree structure...
How will Venti cope with this?

Well. Venti does block-level deduplication. If you have 100 MB of data
in dir A and move it to dir B, you're not going to duplicate that storage
(you'll get new blocks for the directory, of course, but that's both
minimal and unavoidable).

Anthony

[Peter A. Cejchan]

Okay, I'll give it a try.
I must first decide on a (quasi)stable dir tree. The problem is that I have
almost 2TB of data,
so should I have another 2TB disk for Venti if I want to put there all?

Thanks,

Peter.

Post by a***@9srv.net

Post by Peter A. Cejchan
I reorganize my data very often, moving between dirs, renaming,
reorganising tree structure...
How will Venti cope with this?

Well. Venti does block-level deduplication. If you have 100 MB of data
in dir A and move it to dir B, you're not going to duplicate that storage
(you'll get new blocks for the directory, of course, but that's both
minimal and unavoidable).
Anthony