Quoting Erik Christiansen (dvalin@???):

> I'm still getting my head around the concept of having separate /var and
> then symlinking /var/spool back into /home. Admittedly, I do in effect
> something like that for mail, as procmail (invoked directly by postfix)
> dumps 99.9% of mail to ~/mail/*, so only the smallest residue hits
> /var/spool/mail/erik . That outlier has been a backup nuisance, which your
> method obviates.

Quite. FWIW, I choose to have separate filesystems on my servers for
/var/spool and /var/lib (both journaled; default mount options for
/var/spool, nodev for /var/lib), rather than merely symlinking them off
/var. Naturally, one starts out fearing that too many specialised
filesystems raises the chance of one of them running out of room, at
which point you have at least temporary headaches, I was reluctant for
that reason until I got a good handle on how much the space requirements
for those trees was likely to vary over the life of the system (and how
much extra allocation is cheap insurance but not excessive). I've not
so far has a problem with runaway usage; if I did, there are always
pragmatic field-fixes like, say, symlinking some stuff off-filesystem,
or union mounts.

> Looking at /var/lib for the first time in three decades, I see the merit
> of that symlink, at least for backup purposes.

The treatment of /var I used (in particular the unjournaled bit) is
based on the convention that _most_ of the contents are dispensible --
which is what coverage in the FHS document stresses. But there are
exceptions. /var/spool is one for obvious reasons. /var/lib is because
of, at mininum, /var/lib/mailman/cgi-bin and /var/lib/mysql (for systems
that, like mine, run those services). Having database files on an
unjournaled fs was just not a go. ;->

> Many thanks for the insight.

My goodness, you're extremely welcome. (We're all in this together,
hermanos y hermanas. See .signature .)

-- 
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