What partition to use to keep data files in Ubuntu?
- by Martin Lee
I have been using Ubuntu for a few years and usually my partition set up was the following:
Ext3 or Ext4 partition for the system itself (20 GB);
A 10 GB swap partition;
a big FAT32 partition to store movies, photos, work stuff, etc. (depends on the capacity of the disk, but usually it is what is left from Ext3+Swap, currently it is more than 200 GB).
Does this setup sound right?
I am considering to switching to one big Ext3 partition now, because the problem with Fat32 in Ubuntu has not gone anywhere:
for example, right now I can access my 'big' partition with a 'Data' label only through /media/_themes?END. Pretty strange name for a partition, isn't it?
some Linux software fail to read/write on this partition. For example, if I want to play around with rebar and build/make/compile things on this FAT32 partition, it will always complain about permissions and won't work (the same goes for many other kinds of software);
it is not stable, I can not refer to some files on this FAT32 partition, because after the next reboot it will be called not '_themes?END', but something else.
On the other side I usually begin to run out of space on the Ext3 partition after a few months of usage.
So, the question is - what is the best setup of partitions for an Ubuntu system? Should a FAT32 partition be used at all?
