Separate home drive

I am considering making Garuda my main workstation OS. Need help with the installation because of the following points:

  • I have two hard drives. 256 GB SSD and 1 TB HDD. 16 GB RAM (will be upgrading it to 32GB). So How should I partition the hard drive during installation as i want the root and swap on SSD and home on the HDD.
  • Also i want timeshift to use the HDD to store snapshots so i guess it has to be BTRFS formatted with @ sub vol.

Use forum search function and read
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/btrfs

and
:slight_smile:

Don't want to jump into terminal. Was hoping the installer can handle that.

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Boot the installer image and you'll find both the installer and gparted are capable of partitioning your disks.

(Just like many other distros - Garuda uses a very common approach when it comes to an installation process.)

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This is only my opinion many other will give you different answers. Personally, I consider a 256 GB SSD more than adequate size for the OS.

Some installs if you put your home on a platter drive it may impact performance somewhat. This is not that noticeable on most installations, but on some it degrades performance quite a bit.

My own method is to run the entire OS from the SSD and simply symlink your large directories such as media from your platter drive into your $HOME directory.

That's just me, but it's far simpler that way.

YMMV

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That's guys for the suggestions

So once I partition with gparted. Is the installer going to take care of the sub vol in the root partitions and home or do I have to create those

Ditto. Also, Timeshift won’t save on a non-root partition, I believe.

regards

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It does all of those automagically but, assuming you install on the SSD, Calamares won’t do anything about your HDD. You’ll want to format that separately, if not already, create a normal UUID mountpoint in /etc/fstab using any of a variety of tools, and create the symlinks yourself.

regards

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That’s not exactly correct, (I believe). If the root file system is btrfs you can save to another drive, but the other drive must also be a btrfs formatted drive.

I could be wrong, but I think that’s the way it works.

Doesn't it have to be flagged as bootable, then, with it's own subvolid (just off the top of my head)? Else, how could you restore from there?

Or have I dabbed too much Where's My Bike this evening? :wink:

regards

P.S. @jonathon's talk on ZFS has me reading until my head's as fuzzy on filesystems as logic. :wink:

As I stated I'm not 100% sure, but I believe it is possible. I'm keeping my non boot drives as ext4 for now, so I haven't had any reason to research all the options with timeshift yet.

@tbg, I spent the best part of three early mornings reading and trying to wrap what's left of my poor, wee braincells enough to correlate BTRFS with filesystems that I am familiar with, such as EXT 2/3/4 & ReiserFS. I have a difficult time with it--the language is not one I share.

I suspect that like most things I find difficult: It's probably much simpler than I make it out to be. But I'm going to keep plugging away. Eventually a :bulb: will switch on. I learn linearly and anytime I get stuck on something I can't move forward until I understand that one little thing and its relationship to the whole. I'm a systems kinda guy who must understand the mechanics of a thing before I can grok it. I suspect I'm not the only one. :wink:

Experimentation helps. That works; this doesn't. :wink:

At least Linux keeps me off the streets and out of trouble. You? :smiley:

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if you mean snapshot from /@ than it work only on same drive.
You can check this in timeshift.

BTRFS-SchnappschĂĽsse werden auf der Systempartition gespeichert. Andere Partitionen werden nicht unterstĂĽtzt.

=
BTRFS snapshots are stored on the system partition. Other partitions are not supported.

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Thanks, SGS. What I had posted in actuality referred to keeping copies of snapshots in a backup directory on an additional drive. Oops! :wink:

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Thanks for clarifying @SGS.

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