Hello, I’ve been a long time Linux user but I had a 5 years break and I am coming back to it now.

I’ve been trying several Linux distributions in the past week, installing the packages and configuring them as I need with several different orders of success.

My last case was an Ubuntu installation that I was very happy with and pretty close to call it setup and done, until I installed virtualbox and restarted the system only to find it bricked.

Obviously I could try to drop into one of the terminals on ctrl + alt + Fx and fix it, but I wonder if I could be smarter about it and be more prepared for this kind of situation.

One of the starting points I think would be having a separate home partition from the rest of the system. I used to have it in the past and it was great.

But then what’s next? What are the best FS I could pick for each type of partition? A performant one to keep the code and package manager cache, a journaling/snapshop based one for system, another type for game data, etc etc.

What if I would like to have a snapshot of working version of my system backed up somewhere ready to restore as simple as simple as possible?

How do you configure your systems in order to quickly recover from an unexpected bricking without growing some more white hairs, and squeezing as much performance vs feature for each of your use case?

  • Lvxferre
    2•1 year ago

    I only have three partitions, all ext4:

    • /dev/sda1 mounted as / - if necessary I wipe it out, reinstall my junk and call it a day. The only non-default things there are a few /etc files but I got a manual backup of the ones that matter. It’s in the SSD to access is really fast.
    • /dev/sdb1 mounted as /home - that’s my precious, for files that are personal and/or impossible to replace. Kept as small as possible so I can mirror it into a USB stick. It’s in the HDD, right at the start so access is fast.
    • /dev/sdb2 mounted as /storage - originally I created this partition to bulk store my anime series, music, etc. so I could broadcast them through SMB across my house. If I lose those files I’ll probably be pissed, but they can be recovered with some sweat, blood, and torrents. Access speed is not that big of a concern for those files.

    I’m actually considering to create a fourth partition. See, the /storage partition has 1.6 TB, so I created a /storage/binarios subdir in it so I can install a few programs (mostly games)… that’s just /opt reinvented poorly, might as well promote it to its own partition.