Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3605 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 21 June 2006 4:47 pm, Orn E. Hansen wrote:
>  Places on the hard disk, that may grow such as /tmp and /var are
> sometimes well kept on separate disks to limit their growth.  Same
> applies to /usr/local, which ensures local data separate from the main
> OS.
Each installation had different reasons for doing things like this. In 
classic Unix, one of the strategies that governed how to partition was 
based on backup. The root and /usr file systems are very stable and change 
infrequently. The /var directory tree contains log files and spool files, 
so the backup strategy here is different from root and /usr. Likewise 
the /home tree contains the users' directories, and is a candidate for yet 
another backup strategy. 

/tmp and /var/tmp different in that they (should) short term data, and 
generally do not need to be backed up. Because of their nature, by making 
these a separate partition, you limit their growth, but you also need to 
allocate sufficient space. Additionally, you don't want to include these in 
backup. /usr/local is just what it says. It is a repository for locally 
installed programs and libraries. It may be unique to each system where 
much of the root and /usr trees might be cloned. 

For a home desktop or laptop, you might want to keep /home in a separate 
partition so that you can upgrade your OS without having to backup and 
restore /home.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9

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