Re: How to partition hard drive?
On Tue, Apr 17, 2001, will trillich wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 05:57:44PM +0200, Allan Andersen wrote:
> > If it's for personal use I would use something like similar to this:
> >
> > /boot - 16 MB bootable
> > swap - 2 x amount of RAM in the PC
> > / - the rest
>
> that's a great first-install concept.
>
> how big your partitions are will depend ENTIRELY on what you use
> your computer for. graphics leans this way, web server leans that
> way, and gamer's paradise is completely different altogether.
> there's no set defined best way for all instances. you gotta
> figure it out for yourself.
>
> after you munge and install and remove and configure and add and
> download and tweak -- for a month -- you'll finally have things
> running the way you like.
>
> THEN you do a
>
> du /usr/local
> du /var
> du /home
> du /etc <-- just kidding
> du /usr <-- subtract /usr/local, of course
>
> to find out how much you've used.
>
> i'd rank each as a PERCENTAGE of the entire disk space, unless
> you feel like keeping a large partition at the end in case of
> "i'd sure like to break off this subtree" emergency...
>
> then do
>
> dpkg --get-selections '*' > ~/installed.packages
>
> and back up /home and /usr/local, reformat, repartition to
> reflect your usage percentages:
>
> /boot = 10mb or less?
> / = % from 'du' above
> /home = % from 'du' above
> swap = 2 * ram
> /var = % from 'du' above
> /usr/local = % from 'du' above
> /usr = % from 'du' above
>
> the partitions that are busiest should be in the middle, IMHO.
>
> now you can restore /usr/local and /home, then reinstall your set
> packages with
>
> dpkg --set-selections < ~/installed.packages
Hi,
I think Will makes a good suggestion for this "empirically"-tuned
hard-drive partitioning scheme. The only thing I might add is that
the above outlined approach will lose any customization you might have
made to config files in /etc (of course dotfiles in your home
directories have been backed up). Therefore, I would probably add a
backup of the /etc directory to archive these customizations.
Debian's smart enough not to mess with config files via 'apt-get
upgrade', but, as great as it is, it still can't manage to preserve
them through a hard-drive wipe :)
Hope this adds something and take care,
Daniel
--
Daniel A. Freedman
Laboratory for Atomic and Solid State Physics
Department of Physics
Cornell University
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