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Date:      Thu, 15 Sep 2011 05:19:11 -0400
From:      f92902@hushmail.com
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 8.2 Partition Sizing question
Message-ID:  <20110915091911.60BAD10E2D6@smtp.hushmail.com>

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> There is nothing wrong with having / and /usr on separate 
partitions; in fact, there are some mild advantages to fine-grained 
partitioning for folks who pay attention to their filesystem space 
usage.

To elaborate on this:

Assuming you have separate /var, /tmp, /usr and /home partitions, 
the only files that should be on / are:

1. Part of base system not in /usr
2. Kernels (/boot/kernel)
3. root home directory (/root)

Therefore the size of / does not grow with time on most systems. It 
also tends to be independent of what the system is used for, unlike 
the size of /usr for example.

On my systems / is between 1.5 gb to 2 gb depending on overall disk 
size. /usr is up to 10 gb on desktop systems.

A benefit of having / on its own partition is that it becomes much 
harder to run / out of disk space by accident. Checking out source 
trees (/usr/ports, /usr/src), building world (/usr/obj), building 
ports (/usr/ports), running software that uses 
/usr/local/<programname>/logs for storing its log files, etc. all 
have potential to write to /usr if you don't have appropriate 
configuration/symlinks/partitions set up to redirect them to the 
right places. If your /usr is separate from / then running out of 
disk space on /usr is usually harmless.




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