Hi Rick,

With one big partition, you have to back up and restore if you change
Linux distros or reinstall from scratch.  With a separate /usr/local
and /home partitions, you can maintain your software installed and
change the distro and everything still works.  I did this as I switched
from Red Hat to Caldera to Debian to SuSE, which requires reformatting
the partitions.

Also, maintaining a separate /var partition shields you against some
hardlink security risk (the name of which I cannot remember).

George


Rick Rosinski wrote:
> 
> A long time back, I thought I was ingenius by creating separate partitions,
> 650 mb each so that I can back them up to cd rom, thinking that I could
> manage them better.  But, I keep running out of space on each partition,
> having to make symlinks to directories that I copied to partitions with space
> to spare.  I am thinking about discarding this whole approach, and to just
> use one single partition for all programs, and to keep all data on a separate
> large partition.  What are the advantages and disadvantages of using huge
> partitions as apposed to having them broken down into smaller partitions?
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> --
> Rick Rosinski
> http://rickrosinski.com
> rick@rickrosinski.com
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