If I just have a root, swap, and home partition. (I don't need a boot because I don't dual boot 2 versions of linux)

What would be the correct sizes for those partitions for an 80GB HD?

Here's what I have come up with:
20GB root (/)
59GB home
1GB swap

Do I even need a home partion? I won't be switching distros..so I don't even need one right? I don't want to go through resizing if my home gets full and my root is tiny or vice versa. So I could just do this:

79 GB root
1 GB swap

If I am not switching linux distros, right?

Also, how would I back up my home partition if it was too big to put on a cd?

Thanks

If it was my machine, I'll leave
8GB for / (root)
1GB for swaap
and 71 GB for home.

It is a good idea to leave /home in a different partition because if any trouble happen (it will happen sometimes) you don't loose your personal stuff.

The problem with that though, is if I fill up the root with 8GB worth of programs I will have the resizing issues. I think I will just make the root one big partion with 1GB of swap.

There can't be many problems with doing that, right? Don't a lot of people do that now?

Any suggestions? How do you partition big drives?

OK! It's possible to use only one partition for everything. But it's better to have a separated partition for /home.

I said "if it was my machine". In my case I have a 3,4 GB partition for / (root) and it is only 59% full.

It's related with the proposes of the computer, games, home office, server or other.

1 GB for the swap partitition??? I see there's plenty of space in a 80 GB disk, but is that really reasonable? When I installed my system I read the swap partition had to be twice as big as your RAM or even smaller if you have more than 256 MB.

I read somewhere that swap was supposed to be twice the size of your ram. I have 512 so I just do 1 gb of swap.

is that true still or is it different now?

This advice come from the time when RAM was expensive and normally people had a little in the computers. I've read that it's not necessary to have 2 times the RAM if you have 512 MB.