root and /home partitions

[Erik Bågfors]

On 6/3/05, alex <radsky at ncia.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 21:25 +0200, Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski wrote:
> > On Wednesday 01 of June 2005 21:21, alex wrote:
> >
> > > Under what condition is
> > > it worth the bother of setting /home in its own partition instead of
> > > leaving it in the system root?
> >
> >  When you own more than one Linux distribution. When you want to protect your
> > private stuff from getting affected by hard system crashes. Anyway,
> > installing everything on one partition is not very wise, because then, signle
> > partition crash can destroy everything you own. I allways split my disk
> > to /home, /var, /usr and sometimes /boot
> >
> > --
> >  Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski, http://bronikowski.com
> >
> I'm not sure but it sounds like you're saying you can multiple Linuxes
> and have split partitions (/home, /var, /usr, /boot) for each distro.
> That's a lot of partitioning!
> 


If you plan on using separate partitions for many different paths, you
are thinking wrong :) You should have separate file systems instead
(no, it's not the same)

Seriously. There is a great thing named LVM that helps you a LOT if
you plan on doing this. You take one large partition (or a whole disk)
make that a Physical Volume (PV) and in that one you create Logical
Volumes (LV). One for each file system. LVs can be resized at will. 
So make sure you are running a filesystem that can be resized.

/Erik