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It's being 2 days since I had taken a leap by shifting from windows 10 to Ubuntu 20.04. Yeah I like using linux and I'm learning varies things from here and there.

In my previous OS, I had partitioned my HDD into 2 drives. Out of my 930GB useable space, C drive allocated with 450GB and rest allocated to E drives. I used by E drive to save my personal files, media and documents, and install any application on C drive so that, when system breaks it formats only C drive and data in E are kept safe.

I want to do the same thing on my ubuntu 20.04 using gparted. And my questions are:

  1. Should do partition on my system?
  2. If so, how much memory should be allocated for root directories so that, my system doesn't gets slow?
  3. During the event of crash, I know I can restore the system by using something called timeshift. Does this process removes the data in other partitioned drives / slots? or does it affect only root directory?

Thank you.

Rorschach
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  • Welcome to Ask Ubuntu. This site works best if you ask one question at a time identifying a problem you are having with details about errors etc. Opinion based questions like "Should I do this?" are off topic in this site. You may want to search for questions that have been already answered, and read the site help for how best to frame your questions for this site. See How to use manual partitioning during installation? for example. – user68186 Mar 25 '21 at 16:09
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    Also see this answer for how Ubuntu and Windows work differently regarding system and user-data partitions. – user68186 Mar 25 '21 at 16:17
  • "...when system breaks..." partitions are an incomplete solution. Real backups offer greater protection from a wider range of threats. – user535733 Mar 25 '21 at 17:07

1 Answers1

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When dual-booting Windows and Linux, you can seamlessly access data in Ubuntu that you can also access in Windows.

  • You could save your user data on the Windows partition, and access it from within Ubuntu
  • You could save your user data on a separate partition formatted in ntfs format so you can access it from Windows and Ubuntu. The separate partition needs to be formatted in a file system that Windows also can use, so it has to be ntfs or perhaps extfat.

For a linux system including user configuration data, a 25 GB system partition is confortable.

In your scenario, you would use a separate partition, the drive you know as E: in windows, a your data partition. In that case, it is sufficient to create about 25 GB of free space (preferably deducted from the Windows system partition, because also for Windows, the system only does not need 450 GB).

To have seamless access to your data on the E: drive, you will need to

  1. Mount the E: drive automatically during startup by including that partition in /etc/fstab. You can also use the tool "Disks" (installed by default), to set up that partition that way.
  2. Make sure to set your user as the owner of the mounted partition, so you have read and write access.
  3. Then it is simply a matter of replacing your Ubuntu Documents, Music, etc. folder by symbolic links to the actual data on the E: drive to enjoy seamless access to the data from within your home folder.

If you want to use timeshift, you will need more space than the 25 GB, and preferably on another partition or drive. timeshift is a utility to make "system snapshots" so you can roll back in case "you messed up" with your configuration. As such, it records older versions of the files, and required additional disk space, which must reside on a file system that supports linux permissions.

I do not use timeshift myself. Instead, I focus my efforts on a very good backup of my user data. These are unique and irreplaceable when lost. If my operating system breaks, I just reinstall - it takes less than an hour (half hour on a modern system).

vanadium
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