Disk partitioning and swap

[Jerry Feldman {75562}]

Don Troxel makes a good point regarding backups. Back in 1980 when I first
started using Unix, the normal partitioning was root and /usr. User
directories were normally /usr/users. More recently, the /var and /home
directory trees were introduced. One reason for this is backup strategies:
The / and /usr file systems are normally very stable. With the exception of
some configuration files, there is no need to back them up. The /var file
system is constandly changing. It normally contains /var/tmp /var/spool,
neither of which need to be preserved for any length of time. And, the /home
file system contains user directories. Also, the dump command on commercial
Unix platforms is issued on a per file system basis, such as dump /dev/sda4.
On a home system, I would be more inclined to use tar to backup various
directory trees. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman (HP On-Site Consultant) http://gbrweb.msd.ray.com/~gzf/
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