After recent hardware issues, I’ve build a new system. I’m going to install Fedora 44 KDE Plasma workstation on it but my question is how best to set up and partition the new hard drives. This will be a system with only Fedora (no Windows) on it. I have a 2TB SSD for my main root drive, and 2 8TB spinning hard drives. In the past Fedora 43 KDE install I had a 1TB SSD and 2 4TB hard drives. In that arrangement I was using over 900GB for root, boot, etc, and my /home was 1.6TB. I have read that /var and some other /var related directories should be in separate hard drive partitions. I have never used snap shots so I don’t have a clue as to how to figure out how much space that would require. Also with snap shots do you still need full system backups? I would think that you do but don’t know if I am right. Another question: What is the best/easiest to approach to full system backups. In the past I had used 2 8TB exterior USB drives and my backup program (which is one I created) alternated between the two drive on a weekly basis for full system backups. This system has never really been tested for a complete system recovery, but I have in the past extracted single files for recovery of a file. It took 5-6 hours to run a complete backup. My Music, Videos and Pictures take up the vast majority of the /home space. And I was looking for suggestions about backup strategies for those.
I know this is asking a lot, but any help or suggestion are appreciated!
If you use btrfs you do not need to divide up the disk at all.
The only thing I’m doing on new installs is increasing the size of /boot from 2GiB to 4GiB, others are going to 8GiB. We do this to make unlikely that /boot runs out of space for bigger kernels/initramfs in the future.
Are you planning to RAID The 2 HDDs?
If so create a RAID then put LVM/Fileystems into that RAID.
If you going to do full disk encryption then that an extra layer to setup.
For the main disk it’s just a checkbox to set it up.
Thanks for the suggestion on /boot, I was caught in that last debacle with /boot needing to be increased.
I have never used btrfs as I’m extremely old school and have been using ext4 file systems and partitioning with parted. What does btrfs bring to the table and how does it help with the /var directories that grow huge. I’m using flatpak for a good many apps and the /var/ gets large.
I think the article I read suggested using separate filesystems for /var and some others that grow because snap shots could be used to roll back bad updates, again not in my wheel house.
Raid might be a consideration since I think I have enough space but have never set it up or used it. I also have never use LVM so my learning curve seem to get steeper, depends on how complex those thing are.
On full disk encryption I have glanced at the installer and see where you can choose to encrypt the hard drive but is that just the root drive or all attached storage?
Again, every option just generates more questions, but thanks!
btrfs has copy-on-write semantics and does a lot of checksumming to detect file system issues.
Usually you set up btrfs to use the whole disk and do not need to use separate partitions for / and /var etc.
If you do not want to use btrfs the U would use xfs not ext4.
I think xfs also has checksumming to detect file system issues that is missing from ext4.