this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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One single partition for Linux versus using a partition table? (slrpnk.net)
submitted 1 year ago by mambabasa@slrpnk.net to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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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[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year 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It's not outdated, just less necessary now.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.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, but we all always do daily backups 😇.

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year 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?

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year 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.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Makes sense, thanks.

[–] taladar@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year 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.

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year 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?