Separate /home partition

[Mark]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Alan Pope <popey at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> You don't have to have a separate /home partition to reinstall and not
> lose your data in /home. A standard Ubuntu install from the live cd
> has (for some time now) supported the ability to choose 'manual
> partition' and so long as you don't tick 'format' the installer will
> delete everything _except_ the contents of /home before doing the
> install.
>
Strictly speaking this is of course true, i.e., there is no *need* for
a separate /home partition.

However, there are other advantages to separate partitions (and even
on separate disks) if simultaneous parallel access is desirable.
Something I am considering for a future update to my machine is
putting in a relatively small (~30GB) SSD for the /boot, / and swap
partitions, with the rest on other media.  I'm not sure if there is a
significant advantage to this, but I am sure there is some....

Being the relatively paranoid security-oriented person that I am, I
would never just trust that an installer knows enough to do the right
thing with my organization.  It is inherently *safer* to make explicit
the distinction between /home and /<anything else> if one has any
concerns about data preservation.

You can even do an install and tell the new installation not to use a
separate /home partition, then do whatever fixup is required
afterward, but that is more work.