I am changing my current partition scheme (personal development laptop, dual boot) to remove the Windows partition and leave only my Slackware64 instance. What thought should go into my partitioning? I have been keeping /
and /home
in separate partitions, as well as a swap
partition too. How do I decide what other partitions would be good to have in their own section of the disk?
2 Answers
To me /home partition is automatic for back-ups and ease of upgrading/installing new systems. You can even (usually) share your /home between differing OSes (doesn't apply now, but you never know). I keep it tidy (< USB drive size) so I can move it around easily.
Other than that, I haven't noticed much benefit to partitioning other things for home PC use. Doesn't necessarily apply here, but on my main machine I will usually have a small /boot partition for my bootloader and then will part off my "priority" back-ups. E.g., maybe a partition for photographs that I can clonezilla easily (this is in addition to rsync'ing to an external HD and a remote location - ok, my parents' basement). I do this mainly because I don't want my wife to ax murder me should I ever accidentally rm /photos (yes, I did it once - that was when I stopped creating any sub-directories with the same names as root directories).
Honestly for a personal laptop any more partitions are just additional overhead in my opinion, that results in more work but no gain. I can see why /home as a separate partition makes sense, but on a personal machine even that isn't really necessary I think. However opinion on this varies greatly, so I'm sure some other views will be presented, there probably is not one single answer to this.
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