I saw on internet I should create 20gb for root 972 GB/home 8gb/swap approx(1tb drive) I did this during install mint 18 my question. is this correct when I go to computer on desktop the /root is filling up but the /home part is empty does data have to be moved manualy

First, partition recommendations from the internet are questionable. For yours, in my opinion your home directory is far too large unless you have something special in your usage. You have to decide what sizes you want. Look at a number of recommendations and at WHY they recommend what they do, then make up your own mind.

As to your specific question, I suspect one of two things. Either you did not actually mount the partitions where you think you did, or more likely the other partitions are simply not large enough and your home partition is not having as much put it as you think. I would change the partition sizes and see what happens. If you really don't have a good idea of what your usage will be, take one of two approaches. Either use one partition (/) and see what goes where or use multiple partitions of the same size and see what goes where. With a 1tb drive, assuming you are starting from scratch and don't have some special space needs, you could make a root partition of 250gb or even 500 gb, much larger than will be necessary, then after you begin to see what gets used, create new partitions in the unused space for home, usr or whatever.

A lot of people recommend a huge home partition because they assume people will be storing their music or video collections there. You are the only person who actually knows what data you want to store in $HOME. Therefore it's up to you how big you should make it.

How much space you need on / depends on how much and what software you want to install. Some software creates big internal databases, which use a lot of space. I've never needed more that 20 GB for a source-based distro and 10 GB for a binary one, but then I'm a minimalist.

With a 1 TB disk, you've got plenty of leeway. Why not divide it 50:50?

Hi,

As said above, you are the most appropriate person to decide how much space you want where.

Concerning the problem you are facing, let's do a tour of the Linux filesystem standard. / is at the base of your filesystem and on my system its content is
Now, you can have one single big partition holding all these things (your home directory is in /home/${USER}). If you use the df command, you'll see what is mounted at / and any other mount points. How the system knows where to mount what: /etc/fstab. If you check out the fstab file, you'll see what is mounted when the system boots.

For many of the directories above, you can have them reside on a different partition and have them mounted separately at boot, and we do this by specifying what drive is mounted where in /etc/fstab. The following is an example fstab:
In your case, it might be that the partition corresponding to /home is not mounted at boot and you have been placing your data on the / partition itself.

As other post's have suggested, there is no right and wrong answer to this question! It comes down to your own requirements;

like for example;

What are you using Linux for/to do?
Do you plan on hibernating your PC at any point?
How much software (apart from what's installed by default) do you intend on installing?
Do you have any big files to house (eg. Video's, music, etc)?

Once you have answered these questions, you should have a reasonable idea of how big your HDD partition's should be. Good luck!

what are you installing?
how are you installing?
do you have a usable install atm?

fwiw, most "partitioning schemes" are outdated and pretty pointless nowadays.

BUT, i'd divide 1TB in partitions for sure.

maybe: 4 primary partitions.

3 are about equal size and fill most of the drive.
1 is for swap and 1:1 with physical RAM.
then install linux to the first partition (so that would be 300+GB)

later, some additional setup to use the other 2 as data storage (large files like media)

Everyone is different, only you know what you need. Blindly following any advice from the internet will likely result in pain.

You have now seen that 20 GB is not enough for / and 972 GB for /home is too much for the way YOU use YOUR computer, so next time choose a ratio more appropriate for your usage. In the mean time, you can either re-size your partitions (dangerous, not always possible), or the far easier solution is to move some of your larger directories in / onto your /home partition instead and symlink them back in place.

Personally, I stopped splitting /home onto its own partition long ago. It's useful if you want/need to reinstall the OS without affecting your settings/data, but I only do that maybe once every 2-3 years anyway and I always keep full backups. Since with modern SSDs and USB 3.x it only takes a few minutes to back up and restore a few hundred GB, I find it far more convenient for me to just use one large partition for everything, and on the very rare occasion that I need to reinstall the OS, I just back up everything I need, wipe, reinstall, then load it back on. The additional ~10 minutes this adds onto the reinstall process once every 2-3 years is insignificant compared to the convenience of never having to worry about the size of my individual partitions, and having to periodically shuffle data around to meet arbitrary quotas that I placed on myself long before I had any idea what I was going to end up using the computer for.

While I can't fault the reasoning of suicidaleggroll I would suggest that when a person is learning to use Linux they may want to install and reinstall a fair bit and having a consistent home can be useful. That said, with a 1TB drive I would give 50GB to / (the root partition) as it ought not to impinge too much on data storage and, for the moment at least, it seems "big enough"*. That way the /home partition could be wiped and made small and a separate data partition created as things progress.


*My / hasn't hit above 34GB yet...

LVM (just before you click the "Install Now" button)