How much space to reserve for /home partiotion

[Alpha_Sisyphus]

Hi,

1) How much space would you suggest to reserve for /home partition?
2) Is it really necessary to create /home partition? In the past I usually omitted creating it. What are the pros and cons of having /home?

Thanks

Alpha Sisyphus wrote:

> 1) How much space would you suggest to reserve for /home partition?

If you plan to make that partition, reserve "many" space :-)

FYI: my /home folder takes 6.6 GiB.

> 2) Is it really necessary to create /home partition? In the past I
> usually omitted creating it. What are the pros and cons of having
> /home?

I don't have it :-)

Having or not it's more a matter of taste.

Greetings,

--
Camaleón

[vodoo]

Hi Alpha_Sisyphus and welcome to the forum.

The advantage of having a dedicated /home partition is that you can install a newer release of the OS and keep everything in your /home directory during the process.

The advantage of a single / (=root) partition is that all available space is automatically given to the direcories who need it.

[microchip8]

How much space? As much as possible. Here on my primary disk of 120GB I have for / and /home the following

/ -> 15 GB
/home -> 96GB (of which 20GB are in use)

As for why to have a separate /home, see answer by vodoo above

[markone]

Originally Posted by Alpha_Sisyphus

Hi,

1) How much space would you suggest to reserve for /home partition?

...enough...
That is, I know a very irritating answer, but I don't generally keep videos and media files on my home partition, and I have just over 5G in use. If I had a scattering of media files, you might add 10G to that.

2) Is it really necessary to create /home partition?

No, not necessary.Can be useful, though.

In the past I usually omitted creating it. What are the pros and cons of having /home?

see also the previous answers, but
No real use on a desktop until you come to re-install/upgrade, and then it can be a great convenience. Depends whether you want a small amount of hassle now to save more effort later.

[assas1n]

What was the command to show all the paritions ?

[Alpha_Sisyphus]

Originally Posted by assas1n

What was the command to show all the paritions ?

fdisk -l <device>

example:
fdisk -l /dev/sda

[stakanov]

Originally Posted by Alpha_Sisyphus

Hi,

1) How much space would you suggest to reserve for /home partition?
2) Is it really necessary to create /home partition? In the past I usually omitted creating it. What are the pros and cons of having /home?

Thanks

I suppose that you want to use the system for your working purposes and your personal delight.

1) How much space?
a) if you have a double boot I would suggest in the first moment to define sufficient space for your usual working load for this former OS (i.e. you won't "castrate your Win partition up to a point to be unusable just to have Linux running (I would format it but this is a personal taste ). So leave enough space to not having an emergency after install.
Once you have defined the rest of the space for Linux you come to the question "how much space for your home". If you have a dual boot you should consider a small (150-200 MB) /boot partition for best experience (do a search on this forum for this point).

b) I would suggest to turn it the other way round to be efficient. How much space has to be conveniently attributed to the root and the swap partition without running out of space. The rest can be attributed to the /home partition (since this is were you store your personal files and settings in). There a different opinions (as always) on the "sufficient amount" of disk space. I can give you only mine (based on empirical trial and error through a lot of different installs). For root (provided that the first step leaves you enough disk space) I would recommend 20 GB to be on the safe side and don't have to think about it. This is to be clear, more then only enough. Generally that will leave you with nearly 50 percent of the root partition free. As we are using still EXT3 as standard FS in the install, this allows for an efficient allocation of files since the EXT3 tends a little bit to fragment over time, if it is "packed". It will also give you enough of space for whatever supplemental install of programs you will perform (included you will hot have the disk space immediately full if something like a large logfile happens). If you do not want to allocate this quantity just accept the proposal of Yast (that probably will do a "best guess" based on the free space available.
- for SWAP it is generally good that you have sufficient space available for suspend to disk, that is generally speaking you should have the same amount then the RAM of you system. I.E. this will be 2 GB of Swap for a PC with 2 GB of Ram. Many then claim that you need not allocate more then 2 GB even if you have 4 GB of Ram. Make yourself an opinion by doing an internet search on this point. This link may give a good overview.
Now all the rest after all what we have said I would attribute it to /home.

2) It is not "obligatory" to build a separate /home. However:

a) You can very easily copy all your /home with the command line from init 1 to an external disk for backup purposes. I will therefore be easy also to migrate a system to a new disk without loosing the settings of your old one.

b) You will have a better idea which user is eating your space (if you have more than one person using your PC). But this is minor since there are other ways like contingents for users.

c) You will be able (when a new version comes out) to just format your old root and maybe swap, install the new system and just attribute the old /home to the new install. All desktop settings will be preserved and you are "back at home" immediately. You will find this very useful if you "screw it all up" for some accident. Belief me, the desperation will be minor.

Just my "two cents".

Ydatshea u shastlivo..(wasn't it....) (I have no Cyrillic ) Have fun.

[Alpha_Sisyphus]

Guys,thanks a lot for your anwsers!
2 stakanov: spasibo :-)

[Rikishi42]

On 2009-09-25, Alpha Sisyphus <Alpha_Sisyphus@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> 1) How much space would you suggest to reserve for /home partition?

As much as you need to store your date, I guess. Depends what you store.
My /home sits on it's own 500 GB HD. Right now I have 245 GB used.


> 2) Is it really necessary to create /home partition? In the past I
> usually omitted creating it. What are the pros and cons of having
> /home?

Best to have one. Nicely isolates your data from your system. Just had a
hardware crash. I had to reinstall te system completely, but didn't need to
touch /home much.



--
Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.