Comment by glhaynes
4 days ago
On a similar note: just the other day I was thinking about how the Unixy systems I used 20+ years ago used to nudge/push you toward creating several actual partitions during installation. Maybe /, /usr, swap… maybe one or two more? IIRC, I think some of the BSDs, at least, maybe still do? Always seemed weird and suboptimal to me for most installations, but I remember being told by graybeards at the time that it was the Right Way.
still makes sense to prevent overruns right? IE /home/ cant drop the whole system just cause you torrented too many debian ISOs and blew out your disk.
same for /var/ or wherever you store your DB tables like MySQL.
The inverse is also true - cannot download an 60Gb game due to partition size being too small even if there is cumulative free space available.
Ah, yeah, that makes sense, thanks. My experience as "sysadmin" has largely been from the standpoint of personal systems for which that has mostly not been a big concern for me.
This is much better solved by quotas which can be adjusted on the fly without rewriting your partition tables.
Ironically using "modern" filesystems like zfs or btrfs you can do that if they are on the same disk
Partitions are still on the same disk?
I have always made /home a separate partition. This makes it so much easier to reinstall and/or wipe out a distro and install a new one. All of my files are left undisturbed.
I think that is still the recommended way? The GNU/Linux Debian installer definitely does it by default. Even MS Windows does now-a-days.