Disk Partition Percentage

[Cyber Source]

This is a beautiful thing about Linux, here are some examples,

Symbolic Link Rescue;
  One of my clients called and said his SCSI hard drive was filled up 
and we just did his install! We built his system with a 36GB SCSI drive 
and a 120GB IDE drive for storage. He wanted the SCSI drive for 
performance. I found out that he was storing all his movie download and 
stuff to his /home/matt/movies and it quickly filled up his SCSI drive. 
So, I logged in via ssh and moved his movies folder to the IDE drive 
which had gobbs of room. Then I created a symbolic link 
/home/matt/movies-->IDE drive movies. Now he won't be filling up 
precious space on his SCSI Drive but still has the convenience of 
haveing his folders/programs/whatever was pointing to that location 
without changing anything else.

FSTAB Rescue;
  I had one of my servers filling up the /var partition as it was really 
undersized when I built the machine. Quick fix, edit the /etc/fstab file 
and point /var at a new drive (after moving the data), here is the fstab 
line and it is further masked here because of e2label (love that stuff)
LABEL=/var              /var                    ext3    defaults        1 2
Now that line could easily have read /dev/hd?? vs LABEL=/var.
Makes moving files around and working with space pretty damn easy.


As far as backup goes, I run crons nightly and have them shoot the 
(tars) wherever. I hate tapes and with the cost of drives today, I can't 
reason the costs of them either. Jesse was showing me a USB external 
storage unit for IDE drives for like $22 bucks. So you could get one of 
those, get a 120GB IDE drive and hotplug it up (mounts as SCSI (sd?)) 
and for less than $150 bucks you have a PORTABLE FAST LARGE 
storage/backup solution, circa 2005 ;)

Joe wrote:

> Peter, I'm not clear on what you're suggesting here.  I understand the 
> initial partitioning you suggest, but could you elaborate on what sort 
> of changes you might be able to make later using fstab and or symlinks 
> that would actually make an operationally or performance difference 
> without repartitioning.
>
> When does partitioning hurt performance?  I seem to remember you and 
> Bob mentioning that when I set up my system.
>
> Also, coming from the very old days when big partitions were bad, I 
> still think about making each partition the size it needs to be (and 
> no bigger) to make backup/maintenance (such as dump/restore) easier.  
> Since you and others don't seem to think that way, could you briefly 
> touch on how you handle reliability/recovery/backup.  Is it mostly a 
> raid/disk mirroring issue these days?
>
> Joe
>
> Cyber Source wrote:
>
>> This one is gonna get some response. I like to keep it simple. Alot 
>> of guys like to keep separate partitions for /home and stuff. I 
>> prefer the way RedHat does for normal desktops and that is with a 
>> /boot partition a / partition and a swap partition. Then you only 
>> need to dump the /boot and / partitions. Any changes needed later can 
>> be made with symbolic links or in /etc/fstab for different locations 
>> to different drives, etc. That can be change a hell of alot easier 
>> than moving partitions around on a drive, and since changes can be 
>> made so easily with sym links and the /etc/fstab file, it kind of 
>> makes it a moot point. IMHO
>>
>> Frank Kumro wrote:
>>
>>> I am wanting to dump my current disk setup which consists of a swap
>>> partition and a / partition. What other partitions would I need to
>>> create? (i want home seperate and what else???). Also what percentages
>>> should I use for disk space for each partition? I say percentages
>>> because I have many machines which I would like to add these changes
>>> too however they all vary in size. Thanks again guys!
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>
>