Home Folder partition size with Linux?

Question

Home Folder partition size with Linux?

Answer 1

just because many people do it doesn't mean you should.



The benefits to such is that your home folder cant fill up your hard drive and will be preserved if you have to wipe off linux and reinstall it.



The down side is that your home folder may fill up even though there is plenty of space left on the drive. Also you need to put a great deal of fore-thought into how big your partitions should be (unless you use LVM).



And, honestly, how big the partition should be depends entirely on you. If you download a lot of music and videos and have a lot of pictures your going to need a large home folder. If you are just planning to browsing the web then it doesn't have to be very big at all (but 10gigs should be a minimum).



If you are going to be installing a lot of large programs (games) then you will need to make sure /home is small enough to leave room in other areas of the drive. About 15gb should be a minimum amount of space excluding the /home partition. And remember you need up to 5 gb of free space to compile large complex programs. With binary package based distros like ubuntu this will only be an issue occasionally... but with source based distros like gentoo it will be a much bigger deal.



If you do go this route, and you aren't planning for your home partition to be accessible in windows, then you should look into LVM. It will let you create psuedo-partitions (volumes) that you can later resize if need be. Most modern linux distros support it. Just don't put your /boot or / partitions on lvm... as that can make maintenance a pita. Also, if you ever add another drive to yoru system lvm will let you extend your existing volumes onto that drive... so you aren't forced to use the drives separately.

Answer 2

False

Answer 3

I'm always in favor of it. However the size I would give it would be whatever is left over after 40 G for the / partition and however big the swap partition is. So figure 33 to 35 g for that.



Yes your partition can fill up faster. That is still something for you to handle yourself.

Answer 4

Your /home partition should be large enough to suit your needs. What I like to do is create all my other partitions first;

about 1GB for /boot, swap space, 20-30GB for /usr, 5GB for each /var and /tmp, 20GB for /, possible other partitions if I'm doing something fancy. And then all of the left over free space as my /home partition.



It doesn't really hurt to just have one partition for a desktop either. But feel free to explore.

Answer 5

For a 75GB (it's not an 80?) I'd use this scheme.



/boot 250MB (which is overkill)

/swap 2-4GB (If you've got descent RAM you'll barely use it)

/ 25GB (the OS and all it's software)

/home - rest of the drive (all your crap)



I go big so I don't have an issue later, you can squeeze em down if you like but thats a descent size. You always want /home on it's own partition when possible.

Answer 6

it really depends on the distribution,



redhat based distro's usually create 3 partitions on install by default,



i use mandriva linux (redhat based), on install using the default settings, it does the following partitions,



12gb for / - which is the root partition, the one where the operating system is

3 - 4gb for swap

the rest is for /home, it can be re-sized to how you want, but is not necessary,



this way of doing things is very easy when it comes to a fresh install, any distribution that uses this setup can be used to just install the operating system,

the / partition, swap and /home are already there,



for instance, i can install pclinuxos, it will install the operating system to /, over-writing my mandriva install,

swap and /home will not be touched and all my files and folders will still be accessible,



then again, i may want to install fedora, tinyme, minime, etc and the same will happen,



i can't comment on debian based systems like ubuntu and mint because i don't use them or like them,

but i do know that you have to specify and create extra partitions - just seems like to much hard work for me



so in answer to your question - use a decent version of linux and let it do it for you

seriously though - 12gb /, 3gb swap and the rest for /home (not forgetting to create your links)



oh - and just a note, on my 12gb / partition, i am using only 5gb and i have quite a lot of programs installed,

i could use less but i have 2 kernels installed, one is for everyday use and the other is needed for virtualbox,

so even 12gb is a little overkill