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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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.

  •  taanegl   ( @taanegl@beehaw.org ) 
    34•1 year ago

    Well technically, if you’re using BTRFS, you might want to check out subvolumes. Here’s my subvolume setup:

    • Subvolume 1, named @ (root subvol)
    • Subvolume 2, named @home (/home subvol)
    • Subvolume 3, named @srv (/srv subvol)
    • Subvolume 4, named @opt (/opt subvol)
    • Subvolume 5, named @swap (which is - you guessed it - the swap subvol)

    You then set up fstab to reflect each of the subvolumes, using the subvol= option. Here’s the kicker: they are all in one partition. Yes, even the swap. Though caveat, swap still has to be a swapfile, but in its own separate subvolume. Don’t ask me why, it’s just the way to do it.

    The great thing about subvolumes is that it doesn’t do any size provisioning, unless specified by the user. All subvolumes share the space available within the partition. This means you won’t have to do any soul searching when setting up the partitions regarding use of space.

    This also means that if I want to nuke and pave, I only need run a BTRFS command on my @ subvolume (which contains /usr, /share, /bin), because it won’t be touching the contents of @home, @srv, or @opt. What’s extra cool here is that I’ll lose 0% FS metadata or permission setup, since you’re technically just disassociating some blocks from a subvolume. You’re not really “formatting”… which is neat as hell.

    The only extra partitions I have is the EFI partition and an EXT4 partition for the /boot folder since I use LUKS2.

      •  taanegl   ( @taanegl@beehaw.org ) 
        5•1 year ago

        Can’t say I have. Haven’t used hibernation mode for years even. Sleep mode is just too good nowadays for me to use it, so I guess we could chalk that up to a fault of the setup.

        According to ReadTheDocs (BTRFS, swapfile) it’s possible under certain circumstances, but requires the 6.1 kernel to do it in a relatively easy way.

      •  Tiuku   ( @Tiuku@sopuli.xyz ) 
        1•1 year ago

        In tools like lsblk? Nope. They appear as directories, usually in the top-level subvolume, which typically isn’t mounted anywhere in the system.

        Then you just create mount entries in /etc/fstab just like you would with partitions, this time just using the subvol= option as mentioned above. I don’t know if there are any installers that do this for you. Archwiki – as usual – has good documentation on this.

        •  seitanic   ( @seitanic@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
          3•1 year ago

          So, it doesn’t sound like it would be useful for me, since the reason why I have separate partitions in the first place is so that I can re-install a distro or install a new distro without having to back up /home first.

      •  Phoenixz   ( @phoenixz@lemmy.ca ) 
        1•1 year ago

        Yes and no

        Btrfs is awesome and awful at the same time, and it’s a complicated story. It was rather ill-defined at the beginning and took a LONG time to get anywhere.

        Don’t get me wrong though, it’s a pretty awesome filesystem right now and I use it for all my storage drives. Having said that, i still use ext4 with lvm on my system drives and evenrnmy btrfs drives have lvm under them

  •  Avid Amoeba   ( @avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ) 
    8•1 year ago

    If you reinstall often a separate /home makes some sense. Otherwise it’s probably pointless. I’d try to get to a point where I don’t have to reinstall my base OS and invest in an automatic backup solution.

  •  Atemu   ( @Atemu@lemmy.ml ) 
    8•1 year ago

    What you’re doing is perfectly fine.

    It is however more of a mitigation for bad distro installers than general good practice. If the distro installers preserved /home, you could keep it all in one partition. Because such “bad” distro installers still exist, it is good practice if you know that you might install such a distro.

    If you were installing “manually” and had full control over this, I’d advocate for a single partition because it simplifies storage. Especially with the likes of btrfs you can have multiple storage locations inside one partition with decent separation between them.

  •  nous   ( @nous@programming.dev ) English
    6•1 year ago

    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.

    Even with a single partition for / and /home you can keep the contents of /home during a reinstall by simple not formatting the partitions again. I know when I tried years ago with Ubuntu years ago the installed asked if I wanted to remove the system folders for you. But even if the installer does not you can delete them manually before hand. Installers wont touch /home contents if you don’t format the drive (or any files outside the system folders they care about).

    Though I would still backup everything inside /home before any attempt at a reinstall as mistakes do happen no matter what process you decide to go with.

      •  nous   ( @nous@programming.dev ) English
        1•1 year ago

        There was no option per say, at least on the ubuntu installed I tried many years ago. Just a popup that happened sometime before the install but after the manual partitioning if the root partition had folders like /etc /usr /var etc that were needed by the installer. Not sure if all installers do this - but I would suspect if they didnt you can just delete the folders manually before you enter the installer and pick manual partitioning option and opt to not format any partitions.

  •  selokichtli   ( @selokichtli@lemmy.ml ) 
    5•1 year ago

    They are probably using timeshift or some advanced feature in btrfs to auto-generate snapshots so they can go back to a working state using one of them.

    The way you do it is probably getting old. I say this because I do the same, but to use several distros with a shared home partition, provided I have the same GID and UID for the users. This is not recommended but only once I’ve had a problem and it was easy to solve, so I kept doing it. Installed Fedora recently with defaults in one partition and they use one fat partition (EFI), and one btrfs partition with a logical volume and some unfamiliar partitioning. I think we are maybe missing some new technologies.

  •  Floey   ( @Floey@lemm.ee ) 
    3•1 year ago

    I just use /

    I don’t think having a swap partition or file would be all that useful because I have plenty of memory. I’ve never had to reinstall Linux so I’m not sure why I would need a separate home. If I did bork my OS somehow I’m fairly confident I could repair it from a live distro. And even if I did end up having to save my home I could just copy the files I want to another drive if it really came to that.

    •  flux   ( @flux@lemmy.ml ) 
      3•1 year ago

      I have 64GB RAM and my 64GB swap still gets filled to 60% over time.

      It just happens so that apps end up touching some memory once that they never then use again. Better use some SSD for that instead of RAM.

    •  Patch   ( @Patch@feddit.uk ) 
      2•1 year ago

      I’ve never understood why people run without swap. There’s basically no downside to having it. If you’re running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you’re on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you’re probably not in an “ample RAM” situation anyway.

      Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?

  •  Illecors   ( @Illecors@lemmy.cafe ) English
    2•1 year ago

    It’s not wrong, as such, but simply not right. Since you’re using btrfs, having a separate partition for home makes little sense. I, personally, also prefer using a swapfile to a swap partition, but that’s potato/potato.

    •  Mambabasa   ( @mambabasa@slrpnk.net ) OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Alright, but actually I don’t think I’m maximizing my use of btrfs. I only use btrfs because of its compatibility with Linux Mint’s Timeshift tool. Would you be implying if I used btrfs for the whole partition, I can reinstall / without overwriting /home?

      •  Illecors   ( @Illecors@lemmy.cafe ) English
        4•1 year ago

        BTRFS has a concept called a subvolume. You are allowed to mount it just like any other device. This is an example /etc/fstab I’ve copied from somewhere some time ago.

        UUID=49DD-6B6F                                  /efi            vfat    defaults        0 2
UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96       /               btrfs   subvol=@root    0 0
UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96       /home           btrfs   subvol=@home    0 0
UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96       /opt            btrfs   subvol=@opt     0 0
UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96       /srv            btrfs   subvol=@srv     0 0
UUID=701c73d7-58b5-4f90-b205-0bb56a8f1d96       /var            btrfs   subvol=@var     0 0

        /efi (or /boot, or /boot/efi, whatever floats your boat) still has to be a separate vfat partition, but all the other mounts are, technically speaking, the same partition mounted many times with a different subvolume set as the target.

        Obviously, you don’t need to have all of them separated like this, but it allows you to fine tune the parts of system that do get snapshot.