Partition or not

This entry is in fact a reply I posted earlier today on our local LUG.

One of our guys lost a lot of data, because he accidentally done the rm at a wrong level of the /var branch. Any recovery work was made very difficult through the fact that his entire system was on a single partition.

So, the discussion about best partitioning practice emerged. Here are my comments:

My rule of thumb has always been to separate 'dynamic' from 'static' directories.

Every branch which I regard as 'dynamic' (ie written frequently by users or applications)
would go onto its own partition.

Typically these would be:
/var - log and spool files; these days also web pages - adjust the size for that
/home
/tmp
/usr - (mostly because of /usr/local, but also because historically it used to be
separate partition)
/boot - this is to keep the kernel's disk small, away from other stuff, and as contiguous
as possible
/any-other-application

Anything that you don't place on a separate partition will end up being part of the 'root disk'.
Don't forget a swap partition, and consider any particular needs of applications you are installing.

There seems to be a new school of thought, which suggests doing swap and root only (perhaps /boot as well).
I have heard arguments supporting that approach, but they obviously didn't convince me, as I can't remember what they were ;-)