Home Directory in Dedicated Partition, Pros & Cons?
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I'm using Trisquel about ninety percent of the time now! I'm currently using a dual boot, and I have a seperate partition for my files, i.e., to share between the OSs.
Since I've been using Trisquel much more, I was considering moving my files to the Trisquel partition. But then I became curious about "linking" my Home folder to a seperate partion and discovered and article on how to do so.*
I understand that this could be beneificial because the settings, files, and desktop will remain if I upgrade or re-install; but is there any other things I should be aware of or concerned about, pros and/or cons? Anybody else doing this on their systems?
Ultimately, I'd like a system that is easy to back-up and restore or re-install, and if this would complicate it - then I would avoid it.
*https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving
A seperate home partition is the default for a Trisquel install. Try either command 'mount' in terminal and look for something like this in the output
/dev/sda6 on /home type xfs (rw)
Or just use the Disk Utility in System Settings to see a graphical representation of the layout of your HDDs.
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I didn't remember seeing a seperate partition when installing. I used rEFIT when installing dualboot, following these instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MactelSupportTeam/AppleIntelInstallation#Dual-Boot:_Mac_OSX_and_Ubuntu
Could mine being on the same partition be because I installed a Dualboot with Mac OSX?
If a seperate partition is the default, then it will make it much easier if I reformat with Trisquel as my primary install.
If you followed *buntu instructions then they default to a single partition. I have no recent (post-2006) experience of Intel Macs, but this thread
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trisquel-imac
Suggests you can use Apple's UEFI equivalent with a Trisquel / Ubuntu USB Disk Creator made USB stick to install. Personally I'd encourage you to wipe all proprietary O/Ses from your system. However, if you want to dual boot then update Trisquel after install as there's a bug fix for needing a grub password in order to boot that non-free nonsense. I'm afraid I'll have to leave it to other Mac users to help with anything more detailed you might need as I simply don't know.
When replacing the OS, you don't need to worry about the home folder being deleted.
Oh, and in my experience the home folder can be huge (owing to downloads, etc), while the rest of / seems to only take 5-8 GB on my HDD.
Having a seperate /home enables, with many OS' installed on a HDD, a centralised ~/Downloads directory for the ~/ folders in it (through the use of links), minimising disk space usage (see above paragraph), or a centralised ~/Music, ~/Pictures, ~/Videos, etc directory so no matter which OS you boot to you get the same art, and changes to that only require removing/adding once (rather than every copy of a piece of music in every ~/ folder). That is, assuming every OS on the HDD has users with different ~/'s, all of which in the /home directory (partition).
Note: ~/ means home partition of the user
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With all the reinstalling, upgrading, distro-hopping I've done, I can't imagine not having /home in its own partition. My user data are big, and I'd not want to restore those often.
I've had my /home/ directory in it's own partition for years on many different machines, and I can tell you from experience that it's totally worth it. If you accidentally break your OS, as I did many times learning things over the years, all the users' personal data will be saved. This also allowed me to install Trisquel right over my old Ubuntu Gnome install and pick back up where I left off.
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You don't need to reformat when you install a GNU/Linux system, unless obviously there were filesystem issues or you're not happy with the partitioning scheme. When I do a clean install I just boot a live environment, mount the filesystem, rename the home directory to home.old, delete everything else from the root partition (and boot partition), and install without checking to format the partition for root.
If you're not distro-hopping one partition should suffice, and if you use encryption 2.
I use 3, for /boot, for LUKS_/ and for image files (.iso) so I'll won't need to boot from CD or USB when I need so.
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