On Monday 05 July 2004 01:41, MJ Ray wrote:
On 2004-07-03 19:09:43 +0100 John Seago johnseago@two-ravens.org.uk
wrote:
[...] can see no real reason for the multi partition installation. Would the Group like to persuade me otherwise?
Putting /home on another partition seems to be really helpful for data recovery (just deleted a dozen vital files? Next command is "remount -o remount,ro /home" and then get the tools out) and preservation through upgrades. Also stops users filling the system filespace.
Putting /var on another partition seems to be useful for stopping log files filling the disk.
That's pretty much how I operate. /home on a separate partition is useful for the above reasons. On servers I might try and separate busy volumes onto different disks.
Also filesystem corruption on a crashed machine generally only happens where there were writes so keeping some of the writes (like /var) on a separate partition to the valuable data could potentially avoid a headache later on (mind you filesystems rendered unmountable and unfsckable due to corruption are a pretty rare thing these days)
I think that most of the separate partiton thing is a carryover from when big fast disks were VERY expensive, there probably was a point where each of the top level dirs would have been a different partition on a different physical disk. RAID has it's uses but there are applications where it wouldn't work out so well and it wasn't always available as an option.