Size of / and home partitions

[Psyphre]

Hi, Im planning to do a clean install of Jaunty soon, but I'm getting tired of having to backup all my data beforehand, its such a hassle. So I'm considering having seperate / and home partitions. My question is how much space do I give '/' ?

I have 60gb, and I'm a bit worried that if i dont give enough to / im gonna have alot of trouble (installing new stuff etc), but on the other hand I need every GB of space for my home as I like to store as much as possible.

How much does '/' need?

THanks!

[logos34]

I'm a bit worried that if i dont give enough to / im gonna have alot of trouble (installing new stuff etc),

How much does '/' need?

It depends on what kind of user you are (power, gamer, etc.), and if you want to have a lot of apps installed.

~10 Gb usually is plenty sufficient. I have x64 ubuntustudio with a fair amount of a/v apps (but no graphics stuff) and mine's only 6.79 GB (of which 87% used).

You know, if you run out of space you can always run

sudo apt-get clean

to clear out the .debs piling up, which takes up a lot of room

Either that or boot the live cd and use gparted to shrink /home some and give the space to /.

[Psyphre]

thanks for the prompt reply.

This is where I am a bit confused:

System monitor says I have 51gb partition.
Home takes up 28gb.
Since I only have 3gb free that would mean my '/' takes up 20gb!
Which is alot. Too much, I dont quite understand why that is.

I have no games installed (apart from windows games via wine, which install to the home directory) and I dont have loads and loads of applications installed.

[logos34]

run this in a terminal:

df

what does it show?

[SuperSonic4]

df -h will give the same result as df but will use gb making it easier to understand

on my laptop I have 18gb for /home, 2gb for swap, 5gb for /var and the rest for home

[logos34]

Since I only have 3gb free that would mean my '/' takes up 20gb!


I wonder if you maybe have some stuff squirreled away in root trash, or some temp folder. just a guess

[Psyphre]

Hi, I get this when I type in df -h



Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 52G 45G 4.0G 92% /
tmpfs 1012M 0 1012M 0% /lib/init/rw
varrun 1012M 328K 1012M 1% /var/run
varlock 1012M 0 1012M 0% /var/lock
udev 1012M 1012M 0 100% /dev
tmpfs 1012M 1.7M 1010M 1% /dev/shm
lrm 1012M 2.0M 1010M 1% /lib/modules/2.6.27-11-generic/volatile
/dev/scd0 7.6G 7.6G 0 100% /media/cdrom0
/dev/sdb1 233G 233G 35M 100% /media/Storage

[logos34]

If home directory is taking up 28 gb, then it looks like your / files are ~17 gb--still seems excessive.

Again, some people find they have a crapload of discarded files in root trash, so you might try:

ctrl + F2

gksudo nautilus

View>Show hidden files

>/root/.local/share/Trash


And check size of deb cache:

du -sh /var/cache/apt/archives

[Psyphre]

I checked out the trash folder in root and there isnt even one. So I assume therefore its 0gb?

I realised there was an error in my calculating. I just copied over the whole home folder to an external and unlike system monitor which claims theres 28gb, it shows as 38gb when copying it to an external.
I have no idea why there is such a discrepency, but if I assume 38gb then my / is taking up around 14gb which is alot more realistic. But like I said, im not sure which is the true figure :S


If I were to assume 14gb, then would a 20gb partition be plenty for / ? With the rest for home.

[logos34]

sure, 20gb should be more than plenty...But even ~14gb sounds like it's way to big for system files only. Wonder what's in there (or like you say maybe the figures are wrong?)

[Psyphre]

oh really? how can i find out whats taking up so much space?

[logos34]

oh really? how can i find out whats taking up so much space?


du -k / | sort -nr | less

will list all your dirs, largest to smallest

[Psyphre]

thanks. I went thru with the reformat and gave 20gb to / with the rest to home.

Thanks for the advice everyone.