Automatic installation - is there an advantage?

[Tommy Trussell]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 8:03 PM, Phil <phil_lor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> Thank you for reading this.
>
> I installed Linux yesterday using the automatic option which puts the
> installation alongside Windows as follows:
>
> phil at phil-desktop:~$ df -h
> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda5       1.3T  4.5G  1.2T   1% /
> none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
> udev            3.8G  4.0K  3.8G   1% /dev
> tmpfs           767M  1.1M  766M   1% /run
> none            5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
> none            3.8G   92K  3.8G   1% /run/shm
> none            100M   24K  100M   1% /run/user
>
> I've used this option several times to install Linux on older laptops,
> where Linux is the only OS, without a problem. When a new version comes
> along, restoring the home directory is an easy task because the backup only
> contains a few files, if any at all.
>
> The following is an example of where I've installed Linux using the manual
> option. The /boot directory is 300MB and the swap is 4GB, the same as the
> ram size.
>
> phil at Asus:~/Python$ df -h
> Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda6        18G   12G  4.6G  72% /
> none            4.0K     0  4.0K   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
> udev            1.5G  4.0K  1.5G   1% /dev
> tmpfs           304M  1.4M  303M   1% /run
> none            5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
> none            1.5G  756K  1.5G   1% /run/shm
> none            100M   24K  100M   1% /run/user
> /dev/sda7        18G  4.8G   12G  30% /usr/local
> /dev/sda8        26G   24G  935M  97% /home
> /dev/sda5        74G   48G   27G  64% /media/phil/495B-6D38
>
> I've always used this option on my own computers so that I can protect my
> home directory and the usr/local directory during installation. Although I
> keep fresh backups the size of the backup could make restoring these
> directories a somewhat tedious task.
>
> So my question is. Should I revert back to the manual option with
> partitions along the lines of those listed above and reinstall again or is
> there some advantage to leaving the system as it is? If there is an
> advantage what is the recommended location for my /usr/local/ files?
>
>
I am not an expert at all, but I wondered about sda7 and sda5...

What are you installing in /usr/local ? Is it a large archive of software
that comes from non-Ubuntu sources? Could you get the software items as (or
make them into) .deb packages instead? You could even make a local
repository for ease of reinstallation and updates.

Why did you decide to mount the partition /sda5 as if it's a removable
drive? Permissions issues? Might you prefer moving its contents to an
actual separate drive for safety and convenient backup?

HOWEVER, no matter what your answers I don't think there's anything WRONG
with either strategy -- it seems complex but you probably have your
reasons. If you have an effective backup strategy, you probably don't need
to use separate partitions for anything except swap.
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