How do you layout extra storage

Question

When I was doing dual boot all my extra storage was simple in /win/d, /win//e, /win/f, ... and formated ntfs.

Now the desktop only runs Windows in a VM, and I access all my partitions from samba ( except for the destop ).

I'm totally confused how to organise things.

So how do you layout your extra HD space that you want multiple users to access ( ps I use different accounts for different things... ie personnas )? Can't all be in /home if different people want to have access to it.

Also how do you organize your different data: movies, books, music, scripts written on the computer, software projects, software created outside the package system ( I like to keep such separate ) etc.

Answer 1

Really finding something that works for you is the best option. I always create a new mount point either /data or /storage depending on my mood. any non transient data I think I might need but is just cluttering up /home/ gets moved there, as well as shared data.

as far as how do I organize data:

/storage/movies/<big pile-o-moviex
/storage/music/artist/album
/storage/projects/<language>/project
/storage/<logical_category>/<logical_segmentation>

Answer 2

I like to split my data into two central folders: One (I call it normally /heap) with recoverable data which I don't have to backup (everything which is just a replication from a central server) and one (I use /data) for the rest. This makes automated backup mach easier than having to carry a list of directories which are under backup.

That also means I split data from settings and keep just settings in /home as also recommended by Zypher.

Answer 3

All of this is being served by Samba? I'd say for example /srv/smb/music is approprate then.

Per the FHS

/srv contains site-specific data which is served by this system.

Rationale

This main purpose of specifying this is so that users may find the location of the data files for particular service, and so that services which require a single tree for readonly data, writable data and scripts (such as cgi scripts) can be reasonably placed. Data that is only of interest to a specific user should go in that users' home directory.

The methodology used to name subdirectories of /srv is unspecified as there is currently no consensus on how this should be done. One method for structuring data under /srv is by protocol, eg. ftp, rsync, www, and cvs. On large systems it can be useful to structure /srv by administrative context, such as /srv/physics/www, /srv/compsci/cvs, etc. This setup will differ from host to host. Therefore, no program should rely on a specific subdirectory structure of /srv existing or data necessarily being stored in /srv. However /srv should always exist on FHS compliant systems and should be used as the default location for such data.

Distributions must take care not to remove locally placed files in these directories without administrator permission.

Answer 4

You might be interested in completely different to hierarchy approach - tagging , where you assign files to sets and find stuff by using sets intersections, like http://delicious.com/ or http://diigo.com .

For filesystem you might like to use:

• TagFS - http://code.google.com/p/tagfs/

or support traditional hierarchical model with:

• Semantic Desktop -> Nepomuk - http://nepomuk.kde.org/

Remember.

• When organizing things in Linux , you can always take advantage of symbolic links and hard links (for directories as well) !

Answer 5

So you want to have different people have access to the same mounted devices? The standard places are /mnt, /opt, /mnt/media. Or you could set a loopback mount to /home//. There are lots of options, you can do wahtever you want.

Personally I think having different logins is stupid unless you have a security issue or something.