Partitions size for 80GB HDD and 2GB RAM

[Alexander Rudyk (Akvelon)]

Thank all of you for really helpful answers.

I am thinking about this configuration (might be helpful for someone in the future)

 a:  /  (root)   256 MB
 b:  /swap      4096 MB
 d:  /tmp        768 MB
 e:  /usr       8192 MB
 f:  /var       2048 MB
 g:  /home      all the rest.

Think that 8GB will be enough for /usr ports, local and build os from scratch,
and 2GB for /var - in any case I can symlink some of those to /home

So we need about 15GB of free storage only for FreeBSD needs.

Thx
Alex


-----Original Message-----
From: Nikola Lečić [mailto:nikola.lecic at anthesphoria.net]
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 12:13 PM
To: Alexander Rudyk (Akvelon)
Cc: FreeBSD-questions at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Partitions size for 80GB HDD and 2GB RAM

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:26:41 -0800
"Alexander Rudyk (Akvelon)" <v-alrudy at microsoft.com> wrote:

> Nikola,
>
> Thank you for your extender answer. I have two more comments.
>
> Did you consider /var as your email db partition. I really don’t
> know how big will be my mail db on freebsd, but after half of year
> I have about 4GB outlook mail db. So 1GB for /var might be not enough
> in my case.

The hier(7) manpage is very useful to understand the default directory
structure:

  http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.2-RELEASE&format=html

As for mail, it depends on how you plan to receive and handle it; if you
just download mail from pop3 account, it will be stored in your home by
a mail client (this goes as well for mail you export from Outlook to
e.g. Thunderbird). For locally (system) delivered mail, /var/spool is
the default place, but unless you want yo use your laptop as a mail
server, it's unlikely you will store your mail there.

> Having /home as part of /usr is the good point. But in case of backup
> it make sense to have /home as separate partition. What you think
> about this?

Of course it's very useful for backups. I just thought it was useful to
warn you about how much space /usr/ports could need because the default
installation procedure on FreeBSD is to compile sources (of thirs
party applications and of FreeBSD itself).

As a useful example on how much space you might need, here are rough
sizes on my home desktop computer, used for everyday work. I have ~850
ports installed.

  /usr/ports        ~2G (with current distfiles and packages that happen
                         to be there + you will need at least 2-3G for
                         large upgrades, sometimes > 10G)
  /usr/local        ~5G (third party applications + additions such as
                         TeXLive = ~1G)
  /usr/home        ~20G
  ---------------------
  /usr total used: ~30G (includes FreeBSD itself + some other smaller
                         storages)

If you plan to build FreeBSD itself in the future, then /usr must be
even bigger. If all this leaves enough room for /home for you, then
it's certainly very useful to make it separate partition.

--
Nikola Lečić :: Никола Лечић