On 5/18/25 09:47, Default User wrote:
Hi, OP again.
1) Regarding:
"Its unclear to me from OP's message whether OP actually wants to solve
the partition sizing issue or is just complaining about it and THEN
asking for unrelated Debian 13 upgrade tips."
I originally posted asking for general advice about upgrading to Debian
13 Stable, when it is released. The issue of partition sizing just
happened to come up in the discussion.
Thanks to all for the input regarding partition sizing and
alternatives. Maybe it is time for me to learn lvm.
What use-case are you trying to solve that benefits from LVM?
2) Regarding:
"Why not enable tmp.mount (tmpfs)? In most use cases, /tmp is not
really utilized much – pointless to waste 2 GB of valuable NVME
capacity on that."
Tmp.mount is something else I don't know anything about. I should look
it up.
I let the Debian installer decide what to do with /tmp:
2025-05-18 20:11:09 dpchrist@laalaa ~
$ cat /etc/debian_version ; uname -a
11.11
Linux laalaa 5.10.0-34-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.10.234-1 (2025-02-24)
x86_64 GNU/Linux
2025-05-18 20:11:11 dpchrist@laalaa ~
$ df /tmp
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/sdb3_crypt 12084M 8740M 2709M 77% /
3). Regarding:
"Please tell us about your NAS."
Let me clarify: I do NOT have any NAS. (I wish I did!).
Unfortunately, I wrote:
"I would like to be able to do RAID setups, and have NAS."
I should have written:
"I would like to be able to do RAID setups, and I would
like to have an NAS."
I apologize for the confusion on this point.
Okay.
There are benefits to separating your OS and applications from your
data. This becomes especially true when you have multiple computers.
Doing this separation now would be a good way to prepare for Debian 13.
The challenge is /home -- each user's home directory contains OS stuff,
application stuff, and whatever stuff the user has placed there. I
leave /home on root so that the per-user OS stuff and the per-user
application stuff stay on the same device as the OS and applications
that created and use them. I have moved each user's whatever stuff to
the file server /var/local/samba/username directory. I mount that
directory at /samba/username on the workstations using each user's
UID/GID. Users can then create symbolic links to files and/or
directories from their home directory to the mount directory as desired.
One possible path would be to shrink your existing /home filesystem and
partition, add a new /data partition and filesystem, and see how much
stuff you can move from /home to /data. Then at some point in the
future, you could move /data to another disk, RAID, file server, NAS, or
whatever.
4) Regarding rsync filling up /:
I don't mean to unnecessarily prolong the discussion. But let
me say that I do like rsnapshot, and do use it for my daily
backups to an external usb drive. Rsnapshot WILL complain and
refuse to run if the target external usb drive is not attached.
The problem is with rsync itself (which I like and use).
After I do the daily rsnapshot backup to external usb drive A,
I then use rsync to copy any changes from external usb drive A
to external usb drive B. (Yes, I know that is NOT recommended.
I really will try to improve/replace that part of my backup
routine "Real Soon Now".
:)
I suggest keeping one USB drive on-site and one USB drive off-site. Use
rsnapshot(1) to backup to the on-site disk regularly; say daily. Rotate
the on-site and off-site disks periodically; say bi-monthly.
As mentioned previously, if the target usb drive B is not attached,
rsync by itself will create a mount point with the name of the usb
drive B in /media/[user home directory], and write to that until /
fills up.
Since I know almost no shell scripting, the rsync usb drive A
to usb drive B copy is done with a simple bash script consisting
only of the rsync backup command, with options and parameters, but
without any code to verify that usb drive B is attached.
I really should learn more shell scripting. That is something
else I will get to "Real Soon Now".
:)
"Learning the Unix Operating System" filled in several knowledge gaps
that I should have learned much sooner. I recommend it to all readers
of this list:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-the-unix/0596002610/
"Classic Shell Scripting" seems to be the canonical text on the subject:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/classic-shell-scripting/0596005954/
That said, I prefer Perl for scripts (and more).
5) Finally, regarding "what is filling up /var?":
IIRC, among other things, it includes .gz compressed log file backups,
Flatpak crud, and /var/cache/apt/archives buildup.
I frequently do:
# apt-get autoremove
and
# apt-get autoclean
And when I really want to go on a diet, I do:
# apt-get clean
Thanks again to all!
YW. :-)
David
