How Every Linux System Should Be Partitioned

at the end of the day you can configure your drives and your petitions however you want you can have a separate petition for all your games you can have a second drive for doing a windows dual boot you can have literally every single system directory in a separate petition all of that's fine do whatever you want but a lot of the time i talk about the basic setup like if you don't do anything custom how the absolute basic system should be set up and there's two ways this can be done assuming you have a swap petition and not a swap file that being a root petition boot petition and a swap petition or a route boot swap and home petition and i bring it up as a problem every single time i see an installer or i see something like that that does the first version every single one of my systems i have a separate home now in my case i also have my uh my home and my route on separate drives but obviously that's not you know viable in most cases but at least having them on separate petitions is a bare minimum that i think that every single linux user should be doing and i want to see this become the default now you might be saying why why should i bother my system works perfectly fine without doing this and yes you're absolutely right you do not need to do this but you also don't need to have a separate boot and a separate root petition it can all be in one massive petition but there are reasons why we separate stuff out into petitions so let's say you're doing a system update and you lose power during a kernel update or maybe you uninstall some core package and you're not really sure how to fix it or maybe you just want to do a clean install because you have too many junk packages because you're someone like me who does videos and forgets to uninstall stuff between videos and somehow ends up with 1800 packages obviously all of this stuff can be fixed given enough time and given enough patience but sometimes it's just quick to do a reinstall so how would you reinstall if our home and our route are in the exact same petition well you better have a backup because you're deleting all of that data this is the reason why we separate it out if you want to do a reinstall or you need to do a reinstall for whatever reason you can just go and wipe that petition and not lose the data in your home directory because all of the stuff to install linux is only going to be in the boot and in the root nothing needs to change in your home you can actually take a home directory you made on let's say arch linux take it over to ubuntu and all of it is still going to work the exact same way now you should have a backup before you do a reinstall anyway just in case you make some sort of mistake you accidentally wipe the wrong petition but if you don't need to use that backup and all the data is still perfectly fine there that saves you a lot of time especially if you're someone like me who if you noticed i have a 1.8 terabyte drive i don't want to copy that back over because i'm using quite a bit of it but the time saving doesn't stop there let's say you want to go and use one of the countless backup utilities out there and then back up the data in your home petition well if your home and your route are in the exact same petition now you've backed up your route as well and 99 of the time at least for a home user you do not need to back up the route because all of that is going to come with whatever new distro you install or maybe it's the same one you're installing you're not going to go and install the distro then replace everything in the route with the exact same data you just want to back up the data that is important to you and then ignore the rest now it should be noted that even if you are using a root and home merged into one petition you're not screwed when it comes to backups because most of these backup utilities also let you point at a folder tree not just a petition so rather than pointing out the petition you could point just at your home directory and then back up everything in the folder tree that exists under that this will work but there are reasons why you might want petitions anyway this might be a valid reason why you go and split out your games into a separation as well because most of the time the games are just going to add extra data into your backup where you can just go and re-download them when you get onto your new system it's not really that big of a deal if you happen to lose those most games nowadays do have cloud saves but you know if they don't then that data might actually be important also while modern file systems do have mechanisms to recover from faults they're not always perfect let's say you have some really catastrophic failure you're doing a massive data transfer and you lose power during the middle of it and then the mechanism does not play nicely and fails well you may end up you know corrupting your petition and if that's in your route and your route and your home are the same thing well you know once again if you don't have a backup you're going to be pretty screwed but splitting out your important data into separate petitions allows you to mitigate the amount of damage that's going to be done now you can take this to extreme levels and split out every single folder into a separate petition and if that's what you want to do hey that's fine go ahead and do that but at least this bare minimum step is something to protect you if something does go wrong as i mentioned earlier i don't just split out my home and my route onto separate petitions i have them on separate drives so obviously you know if one of the drives fails i don't lose all of that data i just lose whatever is on the failed drive but the other benefit that comes from this is i don't exactly need my home petition to be on the fastest storage available but i want my system to boot very very quickly so i put my route and my boot onto my nvme drive and then my home petition onto a mechanical hard drive that has considerably more space at a reasonable cost now the technically minded among you might be saying but brody petitions are not free and yes that is absolutely true i cannot speak for every single file system out there but every file system does have some level of overhead so ext4 which is the most common file system on linux is roughly five ish percent by default that is gonna be locked down when you make the petition other things like ext3 i believe grew that over time ntfs does the exact same thing so it's gonna use up a small amount but then as you get more data on the drive that locked up space is going to be bigger so if you have a thousand gigabyte petition that is only gonna have 950 gigabyte usable 50 gigabyte loss might sound like a lot but on something a bit older like say fat32 i believe the loss was somewhere more around 10 and at least for me a 5 loss on each petition isn't that big of a deal if it makes managing my data considerably easier in some very edge cases it can make sense to not want to lose that extra space but most of the time you don't want to be running a hard drive or an ssd and it's absolute max capacity anyway because you start seeing a degradation in performance most of the time you want to leave anywhere from 10 to 15 to make sure that doesn't happen but if you're in a situation where for whatever reason you fill out the hard drive or fill out the ssd and you can't add any extra storage even through you know an external hard drive then i guess it does make sense but the times when that happens are very very few it's if you literally do not have any extra usb ports so i think that's going to be it for me let me know in the comment section down below how you actually lay out your petitions do you have a separate home do you just have it all together do you have a separate swap or do you use a swap file let me know how you actually lay out your petitions so before i go i would like to thank my supporters a special thank you to these amazing people over here if you want to come one of them i've got a patreon subscriber only bear pay linked in the description down below i've got a podcast called tech over t available basically anywhere i've got a gaming channel called brother robertson plays where a live stream twice a week upload about five is youtube shorts and this channel is also available over on odyssey that's gonna be it for me and i'm out [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Brodie Robertson

Views: 1,988

Keywords: brodie robertson, brodie robertson linux, linux, arch linux, how to install linux, new to linux, how to use linux, linux partition, linux root partition, linux home partition, partition linux, how to partition, linux tips, linux tutorial, paritioning on linux, brodie robertson linux tutoial, how to linux, linux partition after installation, do you need partitions, why you need to partition

Id: vUKRFyI3uPs

Length: 9min 10sec (550 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021