I am not that there is any useful mileage to be gained from having a separate /usr partition but there is usefullness in creating a separate partition called, say, /data to contain some of the directories/folders normally kept in your /home directory. Doing this you can install/re-install your oS by formatting your partitions except for /swap and /data without first haivng to backup your /home directory (or rather the important files in it). +1
My second HDD has only one partition, formatted in ext4, and it is mounted as /data. Here I created a directory called /Symed and moved into it my Download, Pictures, Video, /.mozilla and /.thunderbird directories and others which contain data I don't want to lose if the main system HDD goes down.
In my /home directory I created symlinks to all the folders I moved into /data/Symed/ (eg, /data/Symed/.mozilla).
Doing this also makes it possible for other distro installations to access /data/Symed/ folders - Thunderbird installed on, say, openSUSE 12.1 can be access by openSUSE 12.2 and later by 12.3 when I install that. You get the picture .
I'd just like to add that bind mounts can sometimes be quite useful. For example, I typically like to have separate /local, /build, /home and /pub filesystems. On my laptop, with a relatively small disk, I don't want to create hard partitions, so I have a single /data filesystem, with /data/{local,build,home,pub} directories under it, and then in my /etc/fstab: /data/local /local none bind 0 0 /data/home /home none bind 0 0 /data/pub /pub none bind 0 0 /data/build /build none bind 0 0 Just my $0.02 worth. -Nick -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org