I'll be wanting a standard user. Presumably a standard user will have ownership of $HOME?
Where can I find out what the default sudo privilages are? That way I can decide what further ownerships/permissions I need to assign to the user for convenient use of the OS.

I'll just want to mount them whenever I need them.

The first user created during installation is always an administrative user with sudo rights. A new user created later is a standard user, by default, unless you intentionally make that user an administrative user.
Of course, every user is the owner of their own user directory ($HOME).
I can't think of anything offhand that you can't do with "sudo". "sudo" allows you to do anything root can do.
"default sudo privileges" is like saying "default root privileges"
If you are talking about identifying administrative and standard users, run the command: That will list the groups that user has. If sudo is listed, the user has sudo rights.

If you want a folder on sda6 to be accessable to "user" right-click on that folder > Open in terminal and enter: Don't forget the period . at the end of the command.

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Sudo doesn't work that way in Debian. Sudo isn't even installed by default. Each user has to be added to sudo, none have that ability by default. Sudo doesn't necessarily give you every ability root has, it can be granted by individual rights. Different distros approach sudo differently, and Debian's is very conservative, very different from Ubuntu, and most other distros. I admit that the most common way for Debian users to grant sudo power is with ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL, just like root, but it's not required, nor advised.

Thank you for the correction. I was going by experience with Ubuntu-based distros.

Thank you, this technique is very useful to know.
One last point though: for all directories owned solely by root, can I use the GUI to undertake rwx actions as root? This is not normally possible because I've logged in as user.
Of course, I can open a terminal at anytime, log in as root, and then undertake rwx actions via the command line. However, is it possible to do the same rwx actions as root via the GUI?

Yes, you can. The command you use depends on your desktop environment. I use KDE, so call programs with kdesudo e.g.

brings up my text editor as root after asking me for the password.

The Gnome equivalent is gksudo.

Yes. If you right-click on a folder, you could see an option listed "Open As Root" or "Open As Administrator". That depends on which file manager you are using.
Or you can open a root file manager (GUI) from the terminal. What file manager are you using?

Sorry for the late reply everyone. My 6 year old ide hard drive finally died on me. Thankfully I had moved most of the home files to a newer sata hard drive.
I'll be getting hold of a ssd now to return things back to normal.

Hard drives do fail sometimes...
Good job on having a backup!