this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Well having a dedicated
/home
partition is the very minimum and pretty much default.If you are interested in having a backup/restore solution for your system you are looking for
BTRFS
which uses sub volumes instead of primary partitions and is compatible with snapshot tools, those tools being Timeshift and Snapper.I do think Snapper is the superior solution however it's also more complex to set up and requires significantly more prep work. Imo totally worth it.
I currently use it on my main machine Debian with BTRFS and Snapper and couldn't be happier.
I installed (well, compiled) Btrfs Assistant, it integrates with snapper and btrfs maintenance, I had to create cron jobs for monthly/daily by hand, but the GUI is pretty nice.
This came pre installed and setup on my Garuda Linux install and it's great. By default it takes a snapshot before and after every update or installation through the package manager so if something goes wonky I can just select the previous snapshot in grub and be back up and running in seconds.
Also just recently installed bazzite on a laptop and it appears to automatically do something similar, but I haven't spent as much time with it to know the ins and outs yet.
What's the appropriate size for a home partition, though?
That's not the question that needs to be answered, first you must allocate enough space for you
system
partition, and whatever other system related partitions that you want to use,var
,temp
,swap
, you get the gist, then whatever space you have left is yourhome
partition. This scenario being a default personal use desktop ofc.If this is going to be a BTRFS system then it also doesn't matter since sub volumes share the total space available dynamically.
Also if this is a modern hardware consider not having a swap partition and instead use ZRAM.