I have the dreaded root running out of space (had this before but not on this machine). When first built this machine had discrete partitions and separate / and /home. I’m not sure what my options are in terms of creating some spare space somewhere to increase the size of the root partition (nvme0n1p4). On my other machine I have lvm so if ever this happens it will not be so big a problem. I am happy with building ubuntu environments (started in 8.04) and backup data is not a problem - I would rather not re-build from scratch but not sure if that is possible. Please look at attached schematic. (/var has been cleaned out where possible - cause is introduction of snaps since initial build). Any advice appreciated.
Congratulations ! You found the reason why Ubuntu defaults to a single big partition for the install since day one 
If you don’t want to merge everything it should not be a problem to resize /home by 50GB or so … you don’t need LVM to resize partitions but should better do it from a live session so the partitions are not actively mounted … (and indeed do a backup before)
In general I personally think split partitions on a desktop system are really not necessary, better invest some time into a good automated backup strategy for your home dir.
Split partitions make sense on a server where you craft the partitioning for the exact use-case and where the core of the OS does not massively grow or change … on a desktop you will often simply hit the boundaries and have one of the partitions running out of space in the long run …
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Perfect first step
Using a “Try Ubuntu” live session and gparted:-
/dev/nvme0n1p2 - Reduce size by (at least) 30GB
Free space following = 30720
/dev/nvme0n1p3 - Move the partition to use the 30GB free space (i.e. do not resize)
Free space preceding = 0
Free space following = 30720
/dev/nvme0n1p4
Increase size by 30GB
Free space preceding = 0
New size = Your original size + 30720
Free space following = 0
It’s interesting. I frequently see people on various forums recommend having /home on a separate partition, but the only use-case that I’ve come across for this is if you want to dual-boot different Linux distributions to the same home folder. For the vast majority of people, this isn’t the case.
The OP has an unusual case: Not only root and /home but also (it looks like) a separate partition for Firefox.
@quarkrad, I recommend that you follow @ogra’s advice. If you’re going to rebuild from scratch anyway, you can choose Ubuntu’s full-disk installation, which gives you the option of encrypting your entire disk (apart from the ESP and /boot). I’ve been using this for several years, and it works well.
I’d recommend the LTS, which is 24.04, unless you have a specific reason to use the latest (non-LTS) version.
and you really dont want to do that either … all your apps and your desktop usually store their settings in ~/.local or ~/.config and such …
If your different distros have different versions of the desktop or apps you are actually asking for trouble here … version X of an app might handle its configs and caches completely different to version Y so you are re-writing the config all the time or it even breaks because of incompatibilities …
If you are after solid stability keep a home per distro and have an additional shared data partition or some such …
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Thank you for your suggestions/comments - I will certainly follow tea-for-one’s recommendation. I do not have a separate partition for firefox - this is a ‘standard’ build one partition for / and one for /home (ignoring the small EFI partition) - although I do have a third partition for photos which is not ‘standard’. Why the label of / is shown as it is I have no idea. Part of the output of lsblk -f is:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/nvme0n1p4 during installation
UUID=ea991d3c-013a-40f5-aa6b-95a40a24f5bf / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/nvme0n1p2 during installation
UUID=e643dbd8-1fad-4913-9a3c-e87ae63c7a5d /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
# photos
UUID=86930a76-8551-4112-9c29-3ea3589cb707 /media/liz/photos ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
# backup
UUID=6022a0fa-5043-4c8e-b0b1-a0d4f96adb5b /media/liz/backup ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
nvme0n1
│
├─nvme0n1p1
│ vfat FAT32 0AF8-E56A
├─nvme0n1p2
│ ext4 1.0 e643dbd8-1fad-4913-9a3c-e87ae63c7a5d 103.4G 20% /home
├─nvme0n1p3
│ ext4 1.0 photos
│ 86930a76-8551-4112-9c29-3ea3589cb707
└─nvme0n1p4
ext4 1.0 ea991d3c-013a-40f5-aa6b-95a40a24f5bf 3G 84% /var/snap/firefox/common/host-hunspell
My fstab looks like:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/nvme0n1p4 during installation
UUID=ea991d3c-013a-40f5-aa6b-95a40a24f5bf / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/nvme0n1p2 during installation
UUID=e643dbd8-1fad-4913-9a3c-e87ae63c7a5d /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
# photos
UUID=86930a76-8551-4112-9c29-3ea3589cb707 /media/liz/photos ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
# backup
UUID=6022a0fa-5043-4c8e-b0b1-a0d4f96adb5b /media/liz/backup ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0
and this is my fstab:
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
# / was on /dev/nvme0n1p4 during installation
UUID=ea991d3c-013a-40f5-aa6b-95a40a24f5bf / ext4 noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home was on /dev/nvme0n1p2 during installation
UUID=e643dbd8-1fad-4913-9a3c-e87ae63c7a5d /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
# photos
UUID=86930a76-8551-4112-9c29-3ea3589cb707 /media/liz/photos ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
# backup
UUID=6022a0fa-5043-4c8e-b0b1-a0d4f96adb5b /media/liz/backup ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2
/swapfile none swap sw 0 0 ```
I use rdiff-backup for my backup strategy which has served me very well over the past years
/var/snap/firefox/common/host-hunspell
This mount point is normal.
It is set up to allow Firefox snap to use the spell check dictionaries (hunspell) of the main system.
I’m sure it’s been like this for a few years (probably since Firefox snap package was introduced).
Nothing to worry about.
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I used to use rdiff-backup. It’s an excellent product.
I’ve since migrated to Borg Backup, which is superior in several ways — faster, excellent compression, modern encryption, as well as versioning (as rdiff-backup does). It’s obviously a little more complicated, but really not much. It didn’t take me much time to convert.
Thank you all - / now expanded. I will certainly have a look Borg Backup.
2 Likes
@quarkrad Please post the solution. Marking something as a solution which does not have a solution to the problem is not good for new people looking for solutions to a problem.
Thank you.
The solution was to increase the size of my / partition as per the advice of tea-for-one above. I have kept / and /home on separate partitions as this has been the advice for some years (on the previous Ubuntu Forum site) as it make upgrading the version of ubuntu (e.g. moving from 22.04 to 24.04) potentially less painful. (I only use LTS releases).
2 Likes
I have marked the post from @tea-for-one as the solution (you acknowledged that his post was the one that allowed you to resolve the issue).
This is the correct way to do things on Discourse.
Glad it all worked out.
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