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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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One single partition for Linux versus using a partition table? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Heya folks, some people online told me I was doing partitions wrong, but I’ve been doing it this way for years. Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.

I have separate partitions for EFI, /, swap, and /home. Am I doing it wrong? Here’s how my partition table looks like:

FAT32: EFI
BTRFS: /
Swap: Swap
Ext4: /home

I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups. Someone told me there’s no reason to use multiple partitions, but several times I have needed to reinstall the OS (Linux Mint) while preserving /home so this advice makes zero sense for me. But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way. I’d like to read what you say about this though.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It's a good way to do it for your use case.

It's not outdated, just less necessary now. With SSD's, you can just copy your /home back from your daily backup after reinstallation, which takes all of 5 minutes.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

is this daily backup in-built in SSDs or is that a manual thing?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

No, but we all always do daily backups 😇.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

Ah yes, somewhere in this drawer I probably have a couple of daily backups from 2017.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

OpenSUSE (and probably some other distros) have it built-in, you just have to activate it. If yours doesn't, you have to install a program that does it or configure one manually.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have daily backups for brtfs but for my / only via Linux Mint’s Timeshift. I do manual backups for some of my home folders every week. I take it the backups you mention would be lost over a reinstall?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

A backup is only a backup if it's not connected to the computer (ideally in a different building), so it wouldn't be lost with a reinstall.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Makes sense, thanks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

How long that takes depends entirely on the size of your home, the number of files in there and how you store your backups.Not everyone has tiny home directories.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

If your home is smaller than 2TB, it's not an issue.
And if it's larger than 2TB, then why the hell is all that data on your /home SSD and not a separate HDD, NAS or file server?