What is your partitioning strategy to achieve a stable, backup-able and recoverable system? - eviltoast

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?

  • Bruno Finger@lemm.eeOP
    7·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for all your comments, a lot of interesting things here.

    I went with BtrFS with Timeshift. Seems to have improved in terms of performance a lot that I barely noticed any difference compared to the previous installation with Ext4, if any at all.

    Unfortunately the current Ubuntu 23.10 installer doesn’t properly set btrfs subvolumes correctly for @ and @home and instead instead just throws the entire OS at the root of the FS, making it incompatible with Timeshift and causing FS snapshots to live in the Linux directories, which in turn would cause future snapshots to contain snapshots, not great…

    Fortunately migrating to a subvolume layout is possible although it was quite painful following this outdated and a bit not well written post https://www.reddit.com/r/btrfs/s/qWi84tGJam

    After successfully installing the system and setting up btrfs layouts and Timeshift, I created the first system snapshot and I feel extremely confident about this solid system.

    Thanks again for sharing your experience!