Arch Linux

hedwyn

Member

Registered: 2026-08-27

Posts: 20

Everything installing to the Root folder so it's getitng full

Hey all!

I'm very new to Arch, been using it a few weeks now. The guides I installed with recommended only using a relatively small partition fore the Root, which is what I did. I now have 34GB for the root and 240GB for /home, plus 3TB spread across two additional internal drives. I wasn't expecting space to be an issue at all, but tried to install something earlier only to get the message I didn't have enough space on the disk.
This has made me realize, almost everything I've been installing has installed directly into the tiny 34GB Root partition.

I've been looking for a solution but not having any luck at all.
I'm assuming there is a way to tell things to install into different partitions, but can't see an option to do so within GNOME software, nor can I find any guides on how to do it when installing from the terminal. (Every result I get googling is just telling me how to install Linux itself onto different partitions, not how to install software into different partitions or disks once you've got Arch up and running.

Any suggestions, solutions or otherwise would be heartily appreciated!

Not sure how important this info is for the aid but just in case it is needed:

kernel 6.18.51-1-lts, Caelestia shell, Arch Linux with GNOME. There are 3 internal disks in the computer, the one Linux is installed on, one storing any Steam games and another that's just storing all my files.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,101

Re: Everything installing to the Root folder so it's getitng full

All install location in an Arch package are fixed when the package is created and are relative to the installations root location so there is no way to change them to adapt to other locations. You can use a small / then if /var and /usr are large have separate mounts covering those for example.

Last edited by loqs (2026-09-13 01:22:41)

mpan

Member

Registered: 2012-08-01

Posts: 1,669

Website

Re: Everything installing to the Root folder so it's getitng full

More accurately: install location is fixed when software is built. Distribution in an Arch package is not relevant here.

First check if it’s not “/var” growing excessively, in particular “/var/cache”. ncdu will help. Run it in read-only mode (-r option) to avoid accidental deletes. Pacman itself stores a ton of files in its cache (default: “/var/cache/pacman/pkg”). You can clean that selectively with paccache from extra/pacman-contrib package. pacman -Scc will also do this, but it’s removing entire cache and you likely want to have the last and previous versions of packages stored locally.

If the above doesn’t help… the guide suggests at least 23–32 GiB (25–34 GB). “At least” is the minimum. Not a recommendation for an average install. Many systems will run fine with just that, but very likely you wish to have more. In particular if installing packages for GPU-accelerated computation, which easily explodes to over 10 GB. And a separate home is optional.

So the best option would be to just repartition everything into a single root taking the entire drive. Have backups of important data. If you can just create a partition on another drive, do it and from Arch ISO or another system copy all your data to the new location, using rsync. You’ll have to adjust “/etc/fstab” since now “/home” isn’t mounted from another partition, and “/” itself has a different UUID. If you can’t do this and must use the same drive, then first backup everything using rsync. Make sure you actually copied both the root and home data. Then repartition, copy back. Again, mind “/etc/fstab” contents.

If you’re using Btrfs, you can extend the volume with other devices using btrfs device add. Caveat: all the devices are needed for the volume to mount. So if any single of them fails, your filesystem is gone. You can also mount specific directories to other devices (or bind-mount directories). But this has a similar problem, only slightly less painful. And if you extend it by just a little, you’ll find yourself doing this over and over again, making everything more fragile and requiring more effort. So, if only possible, I’d go with the repartition route. Have backups of important data.

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