I have bought a WD Elements 1 TB HDD for portable studying, writing up private documents, research on the net, banking, buying and such things. What distros and partitioning and GUIs, like XFCE... are recommended?

does that include Movie & Music as well?

do you want separate /home && /data as well?

it's just a suggestion:
- 20Gb for / root
- 200 Gb for /home
- 350 Gb for /data
- 350 Gb for music etc.

or even split two ways between /home & /data
- just don't do the usual thing,
and make it just one giant partition for / root

1 members found this post helpful.

I would recommend just making two partitions, a relatively small 20GB ext4 partition for /, and the rest is a big ext4 partition for /home. My personal preference is to NOT create a swap partition. If you want swap, you can add a swap file (rather than a swap partition) later on.

The reason for putting the OS on a small partition is that it makes it easier for you to reinstall from scratch without deleting all your data later on.

Putting the data on /home is a bit of a compromise. It's generally easier for a newbie to install this way. But if you want to reinstall the OS from scratch later on, it's probably better to NOT recycle /home. Instead, mount the big data partition onto a manually set mount point (like /mnt/data; it doesn't really matter where). Then you can create a symlink in your home folder to point to the old home folder. Doing it this way means anything strange in your home folder that was messing up the configuration of things won't carry over to the fresh install.

Depending on your needs and goals, you may want to encrypt the drive, and/or use LVM. I haven't really used either myself. Note that if you can't guarantee the physical security of the drive at all times, it's still possible for someone to replace the (necessarily unencrypted) boot loader with something that scoops up your passphrase and passwords and then reads your data anyway (without you noticing). You might be able to get around that by using a bootloader on a small USB thumbdrive that you CAN guarantee physical security of at all times, but...

But, at some point you've got to decide for yourself just how much paranoia and levels of security are worth the trouble. Any external portable drive is going to vulnerable to more points of potential cracking than some internal hard drive stuck in a secured computer in a secured fixed location.

I tend to use a single hardened distro for banking or any personal type of data and not in that large 1Tb drive.

Being on the web carries a huge risk from emails to ad's in web pages. All that risk translates to your data.

In your case I'd have made three distro's maybe. One for general web. Two for personal documentation and three for banking. All can exist in that drive or you could consider virtual machines.