Re: [TCLUG:1804] Reinstalling -- How should I partition?

[Jelly Donut <jellyd@jellyd.org>]

Sometime around the 16th of November in 1998, a certain Michael Hicks said:

: Well, since my partition map has now reached a way too convoluted stage,
: I thought I'd backup my home directory and anything else important, and
: reinstall my system..  I was looking for a good layout of how to do
: this..

I'm getting to the point where I might need to sometime. Well, not
necessarily reinstall (I'd rather not, since I like my existing setup) but
drag out some mass-storage media and do partition-wide backups.

: Right now, /dev/hda is a 1.2 GB drive, and /dev/hdb is about 2 GB..  I
: was thinking of putting /home and /usr/src into ~500 MB partitions on
: hda, then possibly add a ~100 MB swap.  However, I don't really know how
: I should set up hdb..  

I like lots of partitions. It makes it easier to upgrade and backup.
Tarball one, copy it somewhere, repartition/add partitions, remount
partitions, untar it.

: Basically, I'd like to know how big some partitions should be..  I know
: that / can be fairly small, if you put /usr on another partition.. 
: Should /usr/local be a different partition?  /usr/games?

I've got one 6.4gb drive, and I've been shuffling things around in the
last month or two due to lack of space.  Depending on where and what you
install, I would probably make /usr/local a separate partition. I've got a
half-gig for it right now, and that's getting small already (I made that
partition about two weeks ago).

I install all of my source code (other than kerel code) in ~/apps, which
grows really fast when you've got an ethernet connection ;) I moved -that-
dir off the /home partition about a month ago, and it (and the /home
partition) are both nearly full.

I suppose it all depends on the amount of software you install, and
whether or not you keep the source code and/or tarballs. I keep all the
tarballs from what I download in /home/ftp, which currently contains
~566mb. I suppose if I didn't keep the source code installed I could
entirely do away with the ~/apps partition, but I hack with most of the
code I install, so I like to keep it handy.

FYI, here's my partition table.

I do have ~30 other users on this machine, which is about 15% of the /home
partition. I've just got lotsa junk =)

Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda3             248847  122884   113111     52%   /
/dev/hda2            2018474 1745571   272903     86%   /home
/dev/hda9            1185087 1043349   141738     88%   /home/jellyd/apps
/dev/hda7             497667  274624   197341     58%   /usr
/dev/hda6             497667  415288    56677     88%   /usr/src
/dev/hda8             497667  390710   106957     79%   /usr/local

-- 
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| Josh Becker                   - aka -                     JellyD |
| email: jellyd@jellyd.org                      IRC: EFnet, DALnet |
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