Basic Partitioning Guide?

[andy baxter]

Michael Stanziano wrote:
> Greetings All,
>
> I'm about to do a full install of Ubuntu (Feisty) on a 100gig drive - 
> the first time I've been able to devote a drive of this side to Ubuntu.
>
> So, I'm looking for some general advice for a partition scheme.  
> Nothing to complicated, just want to be able to keep my user and 
> application stuff safe if i want/need to do another reinstall of the 
> OS later.
>
> Any advice will be appreciated -- thanks!
For what it's worth, I have the following partitioning scheme:

Filesystem            Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6             8.7G  4.6G  3.7G  56% /
/dev/mapper/sda3       21G   17G  2.5G  88% /local
/dev/mapper/sda1      6.9G  3.9G  3.0G  57% /media/sda1


/local contains all my user data and anything else I want to keep 
between installs. This includes my home directory (/local/home, which is 
symlinked from /home), but also various websites I'm working on 
(/local/<sitename>), the contents of /usr/local (kept as /local/usr and 
symlinked into the /usr tree).

The reason I do it like this is so I can have all the data I need to 
keep between installs on the same partition, and still be able to access 
things from sensible places on the filesystem.

For some uses, it might be worth thinking of adding a '/var' partition - 
e.g. for servers.