Partition Question

[autek]

Does this look about right for a partioning scheme.

/ 5 gig

/home 15 gig

/swap 500 meg

TIA

Ed

[fos]

Hi Ed,

/home is where your user files for each user will be stored. ie word processing documents, photos, etc.

/ or root directory will have everything else. 5 gigs is quite a bit but all of your programs, operating system, just about every is under / . The large majority of that will be under /usr

I would probably switch your option and put 15 gigs under / and the 5 gigs under /home
That is assuming that you are not going to have a large number of large media files. If you are going to have a large number of data files in your home directory, the original scheme might be better. Partitioning can be a very individualized thing. There are partitioning programs that can adjust your partition size after the fact if you see that your scheme is not optimal. Disclaimer: always back up your data first!!!!!

500 megs for swap is fine. An old rule of thumb was twice the amount of ram.

That should accomodate any resonable amount of applications and data.

fos

[Mike]

The reason for the old rule of thumb "make swap twice as big as RAM" has to do with the behavior of programs. A great deal of almost any program gets loaded in once but is never used (think of all the error aborts -- only one of these can ever actually get used since the first executed will abort the program).

Some of you might say "but I have so much RAM that it never uses swap, why have swap".

The answer to that is "why do you have so much RAM that you are never using" -- yes I know, it was cheap, but the point is that if you NEVER swap anything out the applications you are running are not (usefully) using all your RAM.

More swap than twice will not really help a small RAM system. Oh, you might be able to run more/larger apps but speed would slow to a crawl as you "thrashed" (paged in and out). The point is, paging out what never (or only very rarely) needs to get paged back in doesn't hurt speed one bit

[autek]

OK all thanks so far. But I'm still confused as ever. I need space for about 3000 family photos and movies,plus 250 years of the family tree. I also use several ham radio applications as well. I always thought the main operating system was under / and all the personal files and applcations were in /home as well as user information and settings. I don't understand the reasoning with giving / 15 gig and /home only 5.

Ed

[fos]

Hi Ed,

3000 photos would probably take about 3 gigs depending on the resolution, maybe more. The family tree would be alpha numeric data and probably wouldn't be that much. Movies can consume a lot of space.

For non media applications, 5 gigs in the home directory would be a lot. For the media applications you mention, you probably need the 15 gigs.

I would definitely keep a good series of backups on your family data. Multiple overlaping CDROMS or DVDs. You don't want to take a chance with data that can't be replaced.

fos

[benjaminq]

Ed, take a big /home and an appropriate / 5gig is OK for a desktop machine, all my installations never exceeded 4 gigs, and if they did I had to clear the package cache of synaptic/apt to release a gig :-)

No you initial suggestions appears absolutely reasonable for me. My /home is smaller but simply because I have two Linux distros running (besides Windows) and the big collection of photos and music lies on an external USB-disk.

swap at least 1.5x RAM (2x is OK for RAM up to 512, if you have more RAM take 1.5x). If you plan to make _big_ posters in _high_ resolution you might want to take even more swap (but I'd recommend buying RAM instead).

Benjamin

[autek]

OK fos and Benjamin. I think my best move at this time is to invest in a DVD burner. I think it is a smarter way to go. I've had HD crashs and "oops" happen before and don't want a repeat. Right now the pictures and family data is sitting on 2 different hard drives. But, I still want to keep a seperate /home so on a typical desktop what would be a good partition scheme. ? 15 gig for / and 5 gig for /home ??

Ed

[drahcir]

in my experiance I have never exeeded 5 G in a root (/) partition.
I'd use something like
/ 5 Gig
/home 5 Gig
/data 10 Gig

You can mount your /data partion in your home directory if you would like so that it shows up like /home/<user>/data


Richard

[krp]

I tend to run:

/2 Gb

/swap 1Gb

/home 20Gb

I have minimal applications installed so the need for a larg '/' partition is not required.

For backups, if you have a home network have you considered investing in a NAS? Secondly, being that your data is the most important thing on a HD, have you also considered off site storage? With a bunch of images and a family tree, you might want too.

krp