Re: Minimum size for /home?
On 20100304_223459, postid wrote:
> Pairing /home with either / or data files offers the greatest
> flexibility, but it doesn't accomplish what I'm trying to do. On the
> other hand, maybe I'm just trying to do it the hard way.
>
> I looked at a handful of machines here and observed that a single
> user's home contained at least 640 MB of files. That's a machine on
> which Debian Lenny had been loaded recently and had never been
> connected to the Internet.
>
> I'm leaning toward allocating 1 GB for each /home. Does that sound
> reasonable? It seems way too large to me. I suppose that if I later
> find that such a large /home isn't necessary, I could set aside a
> directory in /home to be used for data storage that didn't need to be
> shared. At least that way I wouldn't be wasting space.
>
I think you are thinking about this somewhat backwards. The point of
thinking about partition sizes when setting up a new system is too
give enough space to each function so that you can reasonably expect
that each will never run out of space. You only should reallocate when
you discover that the space allocated to some function is running low.
Not when all operations are safely within their allocated space.
What is "reasonable" really depends on what user-space software you
will be running. Many programs actually use very little user disk
storage, but some actually use quite a lot.
Almost all new laptops seem to have 320GB of HD, at least.
I have several Debian systems on several boxes. All of them have root
partitions that contain less than 6GB of data, i.e. approx. 2% of HD.
So, two distros, and two /home, at 1GB each, amounts to 14GB, or less
than 5% of HD. If you pre-allocate another 5% to spare space to be
used if you ever find your first guess to be in need of adjustment.
This will give you a shared partition of approx. 300GB. If you discover
that you can save some space by reducing /home partitions to 500MB,
that will allow you to increase the shared partition by 1GB. I doubt
it would ever be rational to do this change. If your shared partition
is so close to full that 1GB really matters then you really need a
second HD or a bigger HD, not fussing with the size of your /home,
IMHO.
--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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