/home, /home on the range
I’ve talked a couple of times before about /home, and how important I feel it is to have it as a separate partition. After this week, I wanted to reiterate my stance on this, and here’s why. A coworker wanted to install a different distribution without needing to wipe out the contents of home. Unfortunately for him, he did not have /home as a separate partition, so he had to opt for backing up somewhere beforehand. A few hours later, he came back asking for a hand in setting up a separate home partition. If you’re someone like me that sometimes likes to change the distribution you’re using, or if you rather do a fresh install of the latest Ubuntu, a separate /home directory is the way to go. You can leave all of your documents and files there, install the fresh OS and be ready to go, no need a backup before you start. Now, that doesn’t mean don’t keep a backup of your data somewhere. You should always have a backup somewhere, and I plan to update my Unison HOWTO soon.
Separate /home is also nice when you’re dealing with a multi-drive system and you don’t have a RAID set up. In my old box, I had a pair of 250GB drives, and they were partitioned as such:
Drive 1 100GB - Windows 150GB - Linux (/, /swap) Drive 2 250GB - Linux (/home, ext3)
Now in this case, if I were to ever upgrade drive 2, it would just entail creating the /home partition and copying the contents, no reinstall of the entire OS would be needed, which is always nice.
