fresh install "best practises"?

[J]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:12, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:

> I think it worth pointing out to the OP that using Kubuntu is not
> necessarily something that is deemed to be 'Best Practice'.  Many use
> it and consider it superior but many do not.  It is all a matter of
> personal choice.
>
> Colin

True... I prefer GNOME over KDE personally... ;-)

But more importantly, since the topic is Best Practices and not Favorite Apps:

If you even THINK you're going to be doing installs of other distros,
OR if you are ever planning on simply installing fresh every time a
new version comes out, one of THE BEST things you can do is learn to
do manual partitioning.

Create, at a minimum these:

swap ~ 2GB (more or less depending on how much ram you have, but I
never run more than 2GB swap on anything smaller than a server)
/                 (your root filesystem, I usually make this about 15
- 20GB to allow room for new apps to be installed and for temp files,
spools and such)
/home - the rest of the free space.

The reason you want a separate home partition is this:

Say you install 10.04 LTS today.
In 6 months you decided you want to do a fresh install of 10.10.

If you have no separate home partition, you'll have to back up all
your /home data, do your install, then restore /home/username.

if you have the separate home partition, all you have to do is
manually partition your new install and tell it to use your existing
/home partition,set the mount point to /home, and DO NOT CHECK THE
FORMAT BOX.

Then, the new OS is installed, and all your data is right there ready to go.

Also, if you like running multiple distros, this can help to...  for
example, on my netbook, I have a 100GB /home partition and I have
three 15GB partitions for OSs.

I've currently got CrunchBang (Ubuntu 9.10 based), Ubuntu Netbook
Edition 10.04, and room for one other distro, all using the same home
partition.  That way, no matter what distro I boot into, I have all my
personal data on hand without having to mount extra partitions.

For a desktop/laptop/netbook user, that's one of the best suggestions
I can make.

The other TRUE BEST PRACTICE is to have a backup strategy, and it
doesn't matter what OS you run.  You NEED to back your data up.  Hard
drives go bad.  Weird things happen in installers.  Who knows.

Find a backup strategy, and stick to it, then even if that /home
partition gets hosed somehow, you'll still have a recent copy of all
your data.

For me, I use a 500GB SATA drive plugged into a SATA - USB adapter.  I
just plug that into a USB 2.0 port, do an rsync of the directories I
want to preserve, and then unplug until the next scheduled backup.

Cheers

Jeff