how to improve home disk space

[José Queiroz]

Em 15 de abril de 2012 10:08, Sid Boyce <sboyce at blueyonder.co.uk> escreveu:
> In the days of small disks I could see the need for separate hard drives and
> partitions for the likes of /home, /usr etc.
>
> With the availability of large hard drives it seemed pointless and even
> Solaris went away from the practice and assigned just / and swap.
>
> I have a small /boot partition on some systems dating back to when you
> needed to boot from sectors below 1024 and on some just / and swap.
> If I do a fresh install and I need to reformat / I'll tar up /home and save
> it for restoration later. Sometimes doing a fresh install without
> reformatting on systems that are way too downlevel to successfully upgrade
> also leaves /home unaffected.
>
> My setups are normally just / and swap.
>
> If I do an upgrade /home remains untouched.
>
> Some have said that there could be a problem if something bad happens to /
> but over many years the only time that has happened was when bad on-board
> IDE controllers wrote garbage all over the HD which meant that /home was
> also affected. This happened with at least 3 motherboards going back more
> than 12 years.
>
> I once questioned some friends why they did separate /home, /usr, etc.
> partitions effectively implementing small disks out a large disk and they
> couldn't answer. On their systems when they ran out of space on /home meant
> they had to create symlinks like crazy with
> "mkdir /xxx", "ln -s /xxx /home/user/xxx" to overcome the problem caused by
> slicing and dicing.
> Regards
> Sid.

You pointed yourself the cons of having a single partition: harder to
upgrade, higher risk of loosing data. And if you work with large files
(or lots of files), if you fill up your home partition, you'll have
your system partition out of space, and that will make updating your
system a lot harder.

As someone said before, there's no need for more that about 20GB for a
root partition. The rest of your 5TB solid-state disk can be reserved
for your home partition, if you wish.

I use to work with 4 or 5 partitions: root, /var, /home, swap, and
sometimes a /opt. This keeps me from filling up the root partition,
even when I'm testing some crazy web app that syslogs like hell.