quotas vs partitions

[R. Quenett]

Big foam cluebats, polite or otherwise, solicited and welcome.  :-)  
To start with, I admit that the research isn't done, or really even 
started, yet and what follows are just some preliminary thoughts.

I have been in the habit of using various fairly complex partitioning 
schemes in order to put a hard upper limit on disk useage by such 
things as logfiles etc.  Lately, tho, I've begun to wonder why - and 
if there is a better way, such as disk quotas or some other way, to 
accomplish the same thing.

In general, the advantages I see for partitioning schemes are that 
they are quick and easy to set up, at least at first, and they are 
very effective in enforcing a hard upper limit, and it may be quite 
difficult or impossible to deal properly with multiple drives without 
them.  Also, if one wanted to use more than one type of filesystem 
(why?), they would have to be on separate partitions, wouldn't they?  
It is possible to run different os's on the same partition - 
especially if they are all linux - but multi-boot would likely be 
much easier with multiple partitions.  But for anyone who is trying 
to simplify down to one os, linux of course, this would not be an 
issue.

Among the disadvantages, partitioning schemes seem relatively 
difficult to change, and significantly increase the risk of data loss 
(sometimes for the entire drive) if they are changed.  They also seem 
to substantially complicate and increase the difficulty of managing 
backups.

Anyway, I'm sure there are a gazillion dis/ad/vantages of each 
approach.  Perhaps some sort of best-of-all-worlds hybrid is possible 
- or maybe the best approach is all one way or the other.  4x, on one 
system I have one 60 gb drive - why not one great big partition plus 
disk quotas? Then a second drive could be added and mirrored to give 
the best of all worlds in terms of control, simplicity, and data 
security?  Ahhh, if only life were that simple!  Sometimes it is.

A couple of links (among many) that turned up in a quick preliminary
search

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Partition
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/linux-adv/quota.htm

and I'm wondering if these are the best that there are.

I'd be fascinated to read other people's points of view on the 
subject.


R
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