A week back people were (again?) commenting on this posting
about the bin, sbin, usr/bin, etc directory splits on old UNIX systems. People
claim there hasn't been a reason to split any of these directories since the
70's.

That made me remember an old habit. When I was playing with linux in the late
90's, and running servers through the early 2000's, there was no journaled
filesystem you could rely on in enough situations.

By that I mean XFS, JFS, etc may have been around, but had niche performance
profiles or stability issues. What we had mostly was ext2.

I swear I first read this in a Slackware install guide, but I had the habit of
making /, /usr, /home, as well as /tmp or /var split into different mounts. The
theory was that the files in / changed least, /usr more often, with /home,
/tmp, and /var touched most often.

So in the case of power loss, kernel panic, or cords-wrapped-around-chairs, the
filesystems were split in highest odds of being able to boot again to rescue
the system. / contained just enough to boot, /usr had more useful utilities,
and /home had all your stuff. I personally benefitted from this split several
times on servers and a home machine.

So, really, the split's only been pointless since ext3 stopped eating people's
data as much.