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Sell partitioning to me
Actually, my whole / folder is into a single partition.
So what is the purpose of putting, for instance, the /var/log folder or the /home folder into an other partition on the same hard drive?
Are there any performance gains, or is this just for maintenance purposes?
The Center for Internet Security (CIS) Debian Benchmark recommends placing the following directories on their own partitions:
And optionally
From a security standpoint this can help prevent users from doing things such as filling up partitions, depleting the inode pool, etc. From a functional standpoint, it can help you grow partitions only where needed as you find a need for more space. It also gives you the flexibility of placing partitions on different devices, such as /home on a network volume, or /var on fast storage.
A few reasons come to mind...
Excessive log volume will only fill /var, allowing other processes to get the space they need in places like /tmp
Better control of mount options. (ie: nosuid on /home filesystem )
More flexibility for partitions and filesystems (ie: multiple Linux OSes, followed by a RAID1 /home )
I typically just do '/', '/var', and '/home'. Personally, I'm very strict about /home in particular, so it's easy to differentiate my userdata from everything else.
Keeping one full directory from impacting other parts of the system. A separate /home means a user gone wild isn't going to impact /var, /usr, or other system directories.
Backups. The fifth field in /etc/fstab can be used to choose whether the filesystem would be dumped by the dump command. Separate partitions means you can choose individually which to back up.
