I have three different situations to deal with: (1) laptop or small desktop (2) office desktop, also a small server (3) cluster with 120 cores and RAID5 For case (1), I'm just using swap and /. There will never be a lot of data on such machines and I'll just copy it onto a flash drive or external drive if I need to replace an HDD or do a fresh install. I just did that with a laptop and it worked well. For case (2), I'm less sure of what I want, but I think it makes sense to have swap, /boot, /, and /home. I may have a lot in /home. I'll be using RAID1 and backing up to an external drive, too. If I need to do a fresh install, it will be nice to not have to copy 2TB of data back onto the RAID. If another user (I wouldn't have many other users) manages to fill up /home, at least it won't affect files in /. I think /var might make sense as an additional partition, but I'll just watch my log files instead. For case (3), I let someone else do it! We have a team for that. I think they are using LVM and leaving some unpartitioned space. Thanks to everyone for sharing your thoughts about this. Mike