advice on partitioning

[Zach]

On 10/12/05, AA <asokanon at yahoo.com> wrote:
> get its own partition.  I was thinking about splitting
> the HD between swap, / and /home, but I am unsure of
> how much space to alot to each.  I am looking for a

On several of my systems I installed to a single / partition, and I
wish I hadn't.  If I want to do a reinstall, I'll need to back up
/home.  If it were on a separate partition, I could just blow away the
other partitions and reinstall and when home gets mounted, there would
be all my stuff/settings/customizations/pop email, etc.

Another thing to consider is whether you're going to have lots of
bulky stuff like mp3s, dvd rips, torrent downloads, cd iso images,
etc.?  If so, where will you keep that stuff?  Right in your personal
home directory?  /var/download? /export/share?  What ever partition
will hold all this extraneous matter that we all accumulate, be it
/home or whatever, should be as large as possible.  Probably should be
on a separate partion from / as well assuming you want to keep it in
the event you have to do a reinstall.