[SWLUG] partitions

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2003 at 12:52:21PM +0000 or thereabouts, Justin Mitchell wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-01-10 at 12:36, bascule wrote:
> > i have a new disk drive and i'm going to do a new install, it occurs to me 
> > that i can have an awful lot of partitions if i want, so apart from /, /boot, 
> > /usr, /home, /var are there advantages to having other mount points, what 
> > about /etc/ or /usr/local for example and if so how large shoulod they be?
> 
> I tend to find its a Disadvantage to have many partitions like that, as
> eventually you will discover you have too much stuff in one of the small
> partitions and its an awful mess to try and move/resize it.
[...]
> So unless you have lots of small disks, or you want to have specific
> expansion limits on certain directories, i think your better off with
> fewer larger partitions.

I concur with this. I can imagine a couple of situations where it's
less likely to be a problem:

  o You routinely do fresh installs every year or so rather than upgrading.
  o The box's use has not changed in years and is never going to change.

Unless I'm putting in a new disc (which is only about three times
ever), I do upgrade to upgrade to upgrade to upgrade. My needs have
changed over the years. When I got a big disc (a whole 15Gb or so!)
I did some massive partitioning. /, /boot/, /home/, /usr/, /usr/local/,
/var/ and goodness knows what else.

Then I started using the machine differently. Suddenly I was using
CVS, playing with Mozilla nightlies, and listening to ogg files.
And there was no way I could fit it all where it had been. I ended
up with things like /usr/local/cvs/, /usr/overflowed/something/else,
/noises/ and goodness knows what else.

When I came to upgrade to a larger disc, I managed to forget about
some of those partitions and directories when doing backups. I 
copied /home and parts of /etc (only) and lost amazing amounts 
of stuff.

Some examples of partitions you may forget about:

I forget where staroffice or openoffice live by default, but it
is definitely something I consider non-standard or somewhere I
just don't have.

I don't use /opt. Then I wanted to put a new GNOME somewhere safe,
or install KDE, or something. I didn't have it there.

I downloaded a file I had space for and couldn't finish the download:
the space was in a directory I wasn't running the download tool
(whatever it was) from, and the directory I was running it from had
overflowed.

Now I stick to /, /home/, and /boot/. /home means it's very easy
to tar up the directory when you need to move house, so to speak.

Then again, I'm glad I did go for the silly partitioning, because
now I know exactly why not to do it again! If I had lots of users
I didn't trust, or lots of logfiles I was afraid would explode,
I might consider it, but for the future in general... no :) 

Telsa