Feature suggestions: optionally placing home folder into separate partition during ubuntu install

[Usama Akkad]

Hi,

I've read the article on Theregister and I did not like how he made his
point, it's journalism. Any way for the separate partition thing there
is some points.

1. Where is you D drive?
2. What if the user wanted to change the OS?
3. Which get broken more often, file-system or Hard-drive?
4. What about block size?

For 1, People who works in PC maintenance know that most users prefer to
have two partitions at least. Users (by experience*) know that in case
of troubles "C" could be erased with "D" untouched. So they already put
valuable things on D. Home partition is similar to "D".

For 2, What if a user wanted to change her system to Distro X or Z or
even some proprietary OS? how much troubles she will have if she just
wanted to keep her data untouched?

Would the other systems detect her home folder and put it in a safe
place while they are being installed? or does she have to buy a 500G
external Hard disk* while she has a plenty of free space and healthy
hard disk?

For 3, I think it's better to have two separate file systems for the
obvious reason of which get corrupted more often.

For 4, Last time I checked I remember that a bigger partition means
bigger block size and more wasted space. small benefit maybe but an
advantage.


Sure there is workaround for almost every point here but Ubuntu usually
make things more simple and direct.

------
* though an external hard disk is a good choice for backup

Usama Akkad

On Wed, 2010-12-29 at 22:23 +0000, Joao Pinto wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Daniel Gross
> <daniel.gross at utoronto.ca> wrote:
>         Hello Phill,
>         
>         I think you can compare the benefit of having user folder on a
>         separate
>         partition to users having a backup.
>         
>         Most of the time a user does not need the backup. But when the
>         unforeseen event occurs that requires a restore, then those
>         users who
>         have a backup will clearly benefit.
>         
>         Similarly, those users who loose access to the boot partition
>         (such as
>         due to a hard disk crash) will clearly benefit from having the
>         data on a
>         separate partition. At last in my case i could have restored a
>         working
>         system much more easily without data loss.
>         
>         In the future when bandwidth will increase and off site backup
>         of all
>         data stored on a, say, 300 GB hard drive become common, then i
>         guess a
>         separate data partition will lose its necessity.
>         
>         
>         thanks,
>         
>         Daniel
>         
>         
>         
> 
> Daniel,
> having a separate partition for /home does not not improve data
> protection in any way, it does not provide backups and the data access
> is not isolated.
> 
> Your case would not be better with a different partition, whatever
> caused you the ext4 corruption could happen to your home partition as
> well, or both.
> 
> For disaster situations like yours (unrecoverable file system
> corruption) a proper solution is to have backups.
>  
> 
> -- 
> João Luís Marques Pinto
> GetDeb Team Leader
> http://www.getdeb.net
> http://blog.getdeb.net