[ale] backing up /var -POSTGRES & LABEL

[ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com (Jim)]

Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-02-23 at 05:52 -0500, Jim wrote:
>> Michael B. Trausch wrote:
>> >
>> > Labels and UUIDs are becoming more and more common as identifiers used 
>> > in /etc/fstab.  There are some advantages to this layout, though you 
>> > have to do a little more work when it comes to finding out what 
>> > drive/partition the filesystem is actually on.  The /good/ thing is 
>> > that you can have the system use FS labels or (even better) UUIDs to 
>> > mount filesystems, which guards them against you adding and removing 
>> > devices, and even in some cases, massive kernel upgrades.
>> >
>>
>> WARNING UUIDs change!  Twice now I've had the UUID change on a partition 
>> when I've installed alternate OSs to different partitions on a disk.  I 
>> have no idea why installing a new OS would change the UUID of an 
>> existing partition but it did.  All of a sudden I could no longer boot 
>> the original Ubuntu system after installing Centos (I think), when I 
>> looked into it, the UUID for the Ubuntu system had changed.  I just 
>> reverted back to using /dev/hda5 in the /etc/fstab instead of that messy 
>> UUID=<some random bunch of garbage> to fix.
>>
>>     
>
> That sounds like there is a bug somewhere.  The UUID of a filesystem 
> should not change unless the filesystem is re-formatted.  Sure, there 
> is a tune2fs switch to alter the UUID of an ext2/3 filesystem, but I 
> can't think of any logical reason for its use.
>
Well, just today I lost another one.  All I did was reboot, switch on 
SMART in the bios and Poof!  I couldn't boot.  That was a Ubuntu (dapper 
system I think).

Jm.
>