Separate /home partition

[Ric Moore]

On Sat, 2010-11-13 at 11:52 -0800, Mark wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 6:41 AM, Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks Nils (and the others who responded).
> >
> > In the end I followed your advice and used the whole disk by accepting
> > all the defaults.
> >
> Ah, well, I was going to point out that the biggest advantage to a
> separate /home is that when you update or upgrade to a newer release
> of the same OS, you don't have to worry about losing all your /home
> data even if you have to reinstall the OS.  I went through that going
> from CentOS 4 to 5 and it was nice not to have to be picky and careful
> with /home when I overwrote /boot and /.
> 
> But, I should have posted this earlier and if you're comfortable with
> your configuration, great.  These are things that can always be
> changed later, even if it's more tricky/painful after the fact.

The only caveat to that scheme is that the old .config files might do
more harm than good, depending on the flavor of the day configuration
between releases. So, that might deserve careful consideration when
remounting a /home partition. What I do is use /opt for that purpose.
Then I symlink all of the home subdirectories to /opt. That way I create
a new /home/user directory during re-install and then add my links back
and have new config files as well. No worries so far. Ric


-- 
My father, Victor Moore (Vic) used to say:
"There are two Great Sins in the world...
..the Sin of Ignorance, and the Sin of Stupidity.
Only the former may be overcome." R.I.P. Dad.
Linux user# 44256