Followup on /home partition query

[James Wilkinson]

Alex wrote:
> What would be a good size for a separate /home partition 
> for use with a 3 or 4 GB ubuntu root? 

Vincent Trouilliez commented:
> I can't see any obvious relationship between the the root filesystem and
> the users data.

Alex replied:
> I'm thinking that if I there isn't a separate /home partition,  it would
> occupy space in the root system. So when /home accumulates data it robs
> storage capacity from the rest of the root system.  
> 
> Or is this not the way it goes?  

This is true in as far as it goes. If you have /home on the root
filesystem, then space taken up by files in /home is not available to
the rest of the filesystem.

If you have /home mounted elsewhere, then files on /home don't take
space from files on /.

So if there *is* an separate /home partition, then there is no obvious
relationship between the size of /home and the size of /.

James.

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