What do you all think of the advantages of setting up separate
partitions for different parts of your filesystem (/home, /usr, /var,
etc.) vs. simply dumping everything into the root partition?
Back when I first set up Linux (and didn't have a good idea of how
big to make each suggested partition, and was also severely strapped for
hard-drive space), it seemed that the most flexible thing to do would be
to dump everything into root and not have to worry about running out of
space on one of those partitions, given that I wasn't going to be able to
resize the partitions nondestructively. (I mean, granted, you can symlink
around that, but it's a little bit of a pain.)
My setup has changed since then, actually, but I'm still wondering
about the disadvantages of such a setup as compared to its flexibility.
From what I understand, the main disadvantage is that if your root
filesystem gets unrecoverably corrupted, and you've dumped everything into
it, you lose everything. For a typical single-user Linux installation, are
there other disadvantages that I'm not thinking of?
Matt