[COLUG] Partiton Size

[Rob Funk]

Edward Dunagin wrote:
> Am I missing something? When we had the smaller, least expensive hard
> drives, I used to split my partitions up. But now, I have an
> inexpensive 122GB H/D and do not set up any partitions and use all of
> it.

The reasons I partition my disks are multiple.  One big one is that I can 
select exactly how to backup each part of the system; I don't need to 
backup my /usr partition because it's pretty easy to recreate based on 
the information in / and /var, and /home needs to be backed up more often 
than the rest.  Another one, somewhat related, is that when I move to a 
different machine I only need to pull files and information from a few 
partitions (or their backups).

Then there's stability.  It's vital to keep the root (and /boot if you 
have one) partition stable and reliable so you can get a minimally 
running system, which primarily means keeping a lot of things out of 
root.  The /var partition gets written to a LOT, as does /home.  
(And /tmp, but I already mentioned putting that in its own virtual-memory 
filesystem.)  I'd rather not have them step on each other, nor on more 
quiet parts of the system.  If I somehow fill /home, it's nice not to 
have it mess up /var, and vice-versa.  If a filesystem gets corrupted 
somehow (more likely on the volatile ones), I'd rather not have it mess 
up the rest of my disk, especially the root and /boot; it's nice to be 
able to boot the system's own disk to recover a filesystem.  Meanwhile, I 
can be fairly confident that /usr (and root, when that's kept small) is 
stable even if some other partition is not.

A nice side benefit, mostly on machines I reboot often such as my laptop, 
is that I can set up the periodic filesystem check to stagger what 
filesystem is checked when, so I rarely have to wait for more than one 
piece of the disk to be checked.  (I like to set the boots-between-checks 
count on each filesystem to consecutive prime numbers.)  And yes, even 
with journaling filesystems it's a good idea to do periodic disk checks.

Finally, sometimes a different filesystem type is better for part of the 
system.  Someone doing lots of multimedia work might want /home to be 
xfs, since that was designed for multimedia work (e.g. good performance 
on large files), while using the more reliable and general-purpose ext3 
for the rest of the OS.

Here's one good discussion of this:
http://tldp.org/LDP/lame/LAME/linux-admin-made-easy/install-partitioning.html


At the same time, I recognize that most people don't want to deal with 
multiple partitions, and would be more lost in a recovery situation with 
multiple partitions than with one, even if they end up with less that 
would be recoverable by someone more knowledgable.  So that's why I 
mentioned the "really simple" option of just swap and root.

-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rfunk at funknet.net> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"