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My computer recently got messed up because of timeshift filling up all my storage. I had to erase my partitions and reinstall Mint. Some users said to separate /home from root next time. In other places I read it's better to just have root and swap which is the default. Should I reinstall making a separate /home partition?

I should add that I'm not using timeshift anymore, so is there still a risk of my root folder getting filled up to the point of no use?

ninjaone
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  • An even better way to do it is to set up logical volumes. You can create a separate one for both root and home. – Nasir Riley Jun 26 '19 at 21:34

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Ever since version 2.4 of the Linux kernel, there's no advantage to having a separate swap partition if you only have one OS, so most folks just create a swap file when installing Linux, and put that in /root. So, you really only need /root.

(If you have multiple Linux OS, then each would have its own swap file, but could share one swap partition, so in that case, so long as you don't ever use hibernation and don't virtualize, there are advantages to a swap partition.)

However, there is significant advantage to having a separate partition for /home, in that it makes backup of data easier. Since what you create and what you download goes into /home, separating that from /root means if /root is corrupted, or you need to install/re-install the OS, your data is intact.

K7AAY
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