Moving from 10.04 to 12.04

[Johnny Rosenberg]

2012/9/9 Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net>:
> On 09/09/2012 11:01 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
>>
>> On 9 September 2012 16:49, Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I know from reading your posts in the past you know way more than I do,
>>> but
>>> I don't agree here.  Maybe I didn't make my intent clear.  The two drives
>>> will /never/ be hooked up at the same time.  The old HD will only be a
>>> fallback if for some reason I can't get everything working on the new
>>> install.
>>
>>
>> OK, that's fine. It's your PC! Do what you like! :¬) But one question
>> - how are you going to transfer all your files & data across from old
>> to new disk?
>
>
> As I mention when I started this thread I would transfer them to my laptop
> and then back to the new HD.  Thinking about my response I realized that I
> have an external USB HD that I use for regular back ups so they would be
> available there also.
>
>
>>> So are you saying here that my calculation method is correct, but I could
>>> reclaim a lot of space by doing what you outline above. In that case I
>>> should do the clean up and then redo the calculation.
>>
>>
>> If you like, yes. I am not sure there is much to be availed from it,
>> but if you want to, knock yourself out. :¬)
>>
>> I don't know this, but I suspect something like it might be the case:
>> if you have a big root FS, then Ubuntu won't bother to be very
>> diligent about cleaning up package caches and so on. It might only
>> take the time to clear down caches, possibly to purge old logfiles and
>> so on once free space on the volume drops to a certain percentage or
>> something. So if you have a relatively huge filesystem, it will let
>> stuff mount up; if you have a smaller one, it will purge caches & logs
>> more often to ensure that the drive never gets below 25% full or
>> something.
>>
>> This is pure supposition, I emphasise.
>>
>> But in terms of space for root - a full install of Ubuntu is only a
>> few gig. Add in all the proprietary extras and so on and it's still
>> not much bigger than that. You can fit a working, complete,
>> un-pared-down install into 4GB. 8GB will be less than 50% used when
>> new. 16GB will be under 25% used when new, full updated & with a few
>> extra apps added - I routinely add things like Pidgin, Synaptic,
>> Google Chrome, a few indicators, commonly VirtualBox and so on.
>>
>> 16GB is quite generous and will normally go 75% unused. 32GB is
>> extremely generous and will typically go about 85-90% unused. More
>> than that is just throwing disk space away, but hey, if you have it,
>> there is nothing to stop you throwing it away.
>>
>> My server machines (no GUI etc.) typically run off 8GB drives or
>> partitions and have tons of room to spare.
>>
>>
>
> All the numbers you state above just make me more than ever want to know if
> the assumptions I made in calculating what the size of my / partition would
> be if I had a separate /home partition on my present HD. I calculated it to
> be 41GB which seemed high compared to what I saw on the web and certainly is
> when looking at your numbers.  So far no one has said "Hey Jim your numbers
> are way off because..."
>
> Regards,  Jim

I don't know if this is of any help, but I guess I could share my file
system data. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 today from scratch, except that
I kept my files on my /home partition. My previous version was Ubuntu
10.10, so I figured that I would save a lot of time doing this from
scratch rather than upgrade from the update manager.

Anyway, my internal drive, which is 300 GB is split into the following
partitions:
sda5 is my / directory and it is 18.3 GiB, but only 4.9 GiB (≈28 %) is
used at the moment, so I guess 18.3 GiB is way overkill. Maybe
somewhat less than 10 would be more reasonable, let's say 7 or 8.
sda6 is my /boot partition. I guess it's not necessary to have /boot
on a separate partition, and I am not sure why I have it, but it's
rather small anyway: 938.0 MiB, that's less than 1 GiB. Only 186.2 MiB
(≈20 %) of it is used, though.
sda7 is my 1.86 GiB swap partiton.
sda8 is my /home directory and it holds the rest of the drive, which
is 272.3 GiB. How much I used so far is not very interesting, since it
depends on what kind of files you have and how many. For Video
production, my drive might not be big enough in the long run, but I'm
mostly an audio guy (and kind of a musician) so there are a lot of
FLAC files, but also some images and videos. One need to have more
than one hobby in life, right…? I can see no reason to keep a part of
the drive unused, because sooner or later you use more space than you
though you would. I use approximately 60 % of my /home space, which is
157.6 GiB.

So, if I had your stuff, I would probably try 8 GiB (≈8.6 GB) for /,
no separate /boot partition (unless someone suddenly gave me a very
good reason for it) and the rest for /home, which would be about 991.4
GB, right? Minus your Swap partition, of course. I don't think you
mentioned it, but maybe I just missed it somehow. So, if 4 GB (≈3.73
GiB) of Swap, then maybe 9 GB for /, 4 GB for Swap and 987 GB for
/home would work fine. Or 10 – 4 – 986… Well, with 1 TB it's not that
critical… ☺


Johnny Rosenberg