Strategy for /tmp and /home Partitioning

[Marcin Struzak]

> 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?

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 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.

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 /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...

My $0.02.

--Marcin