Strategy for /tmp and /home Partitioning

[Mike McCarty]

Marcin Struzak wrote:
>> I want to be able to use /tmp for holding backups with CD as
>> eventual destination, and not overflow.
> 
> 
> Are you expecting your CD images to go (temporarily) to /tmp out of 
> choice, or as side-effect?  In other words, are you actually planning on 
> using /tmp for that, or is there a piece of software that you are using 
> to do your backups that you know will end up filling up /tmp?

Well, sort of both. The backups need to be placed where the CD
splitter/writer looks for them. OTOH, that is configurable, but
defaults to /tmp.

> I am asking, because /tmp, as far as I know, is used for different 
> purpose. For one, if I am not mistaken, its contents is not (guaranteed 
> to be) preserved across a reboot.  Most transient files (but not as 

It is for transient stuff, indeed. I believe that on many systems,
/tmp is cleared out upon reboot.

> transient as the stuff in /tmp), such as print spool, mail spool, logs, 
> bind slave maps, etc, end up under /var.  It seems that Fedora also 
> places ftp and httpd, as well as many trees under /var.

Yes, that is my understanding as well.

> If you have the choice of where to temporarily place the CD images, you 
> could stick them under /var; or you could put them inside of 

This begs the question. Then I would be asking whether I could make
/var be a soft link. In any case, I'm considering that, as well.
See below.

> /home/<you>; or you could have a dedicated root-level tree, e.g., 
> /space.  /tmp just seems awkward for something as precious as a backup 
> CD image, even if it's there only temporarily...

Umm. If the machine reboots unexpectedly, I've got more of a problem
than just where to put temporary backup CD images. BTW, the split up
ISOs are what go into /tmp, not the original backup image.

But the original issue remains: What to do with /tmp?
Also, /var/spool can grow to be quite large. I've seen print jobs go
nuts, and write gigs of stuff to spool files.

I haven't tried to supply all the information that I have on hand,
because if the question can be answered for /tmp, then it can be
answered for /var and /usr/local/tmp and /usr/local/var and all the
other similar places in a similar way. There's no need for the
list to be burdened with trying to figure out exactly what all
I need to do to be satisfied, when I can figure that out as I go.
The main thing I need is to know whether and if so how my idea
can be carried out, along the lines of the reply "you'd do
better to use a loopback..." and why.

Mike
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