how to improve home disk space

[Hakan Koseoglu]

2012/4/15 José Queiroz <zekkerj at gmail.com>:
> 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.
ext3 will set aside 5% of the free disk before reporting to
unprivileged processes that there's no space. This can be changed with
tune2fs. So no, filling up your userspace will not affect the rest of
the OS immediately. For a relatively ancient -  500GB disk, 5% is
25GB, more than enough for any recovery.
For people who want to live on the edge or want to use the full disk
capacity for non-OS purposes, this value can be changed with tune2fs
-m.