<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Daniel Gross <<a href="mailto:daniel.gross@utoronto.ca">daniel.gross@utoronto.ca</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> 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 <div><div></div> </div></blockquote><div> 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. </div></div>-- João Luís Marques Pinto GetDeb Team Leader <a href="http://www.getdeb.net">http://www.getdeb.net</a> <a href="http://blog.getdeb.net">http://blog.getdeb.net</a>