Partition or not for a WebDAV?

Question

I just set up my first Pi. it's a 4B and runs Raspbian Lite on a 32GB card. Now I have to make some strategic decisions for the future and like to ask for some opinions.

I want it to run a WebDAV, so I can share files easily between my devices. As I will try out Pi-Hole some time and it's coming with lighttp, I guess that's the one to go for from the beginning?

What about the memory? Should I give Raspbian the whole card? Should I make a partition (i.e. 20 GB) for the WebDAV? Or use a flash drive? With a 20GB partition there's still 11GB left for Raspbian, >I< think that's enough, for each.

Thank you for your opinion :-)

Answer 1

Splitting the SD card really has no benefits as you:

1. Possibly losing space to cope with any wear levelling in one partition rather than overall
2. Restricting the space that may be needed for upgrades or programs
3. Restricting file space to the partition
4. Making backups and restores more complex as you have partitions to handle as well as directories and files

Numbers 2 and 3 are a juggling act - you end up trading OS space for file space as the card gets full...

It would make sense to look at putting the WebDAV folder outside of the default home so you can move it off onto a small HDD or SSD via usb longer term.

As for lighttp vs Apache - pi-hole used to install lighttp at every upgrade if you selected Apache as the web server at initial install not matter what you did. I'm not sure this was ever fixed (it may be) as I gave up and used lighttp in end!

Given pi-hole can run happily on a Zero W (for 17 clients here) I have not split file serving and dns onto multiple Pi computers (they do seem to get lonely and you end up with more than one).