Hard drive space

On Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:13:19 +0200 (CEST)
name at domain wrote:

> What I mean is that I want the formatting data itself to take the
> least space possible and thus leave me with the most of my 320 gb
> drive.

First and quick: When you run the installer make sure that the
partition where you store most of your data is formatted to have 0%
reserved for root. This usually is set at the default of 5%, and if you
have 300GB to partition and mkfs you already lost something like
15GB in the reservation. It probably isn't a good idea from a system's
administration viewpoint, but as a personal machine it should be fine
(plus you might want to play with quotas).

There really isn't a feasible option(yet) on GNU+Linux in regards to
transparent filesystem compression, which is what I would suggest.

You could put your /home in a FUSE FS which has some zlib compression
or other, there are a few of them out there that do that - however
all the files in the rest of your filesystem wouldn't be compressed
(which would be nice to see due to the nature of having a zillion small
files throughout /*). ZFS provides compression and there is some
ZFS-in-userspace (due to CDDL incompatibilities with GPL'd Linux, ZFS
cannot be in the kernel).

However, if you're OK with the cutting edge you can grab the latest
kernel and try btrfs(not sure if you can boot from this yet) which
provides compression and is seen as the way forward in terms of Linux
filesystems.

Remember backups.

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