Using a separate Home partition in Linux for user data is a good practice By default most Linux distros create one big partition for the system files and user files, with only a separate partition for the Swap area. But with this setup, when you reinstall Linux, you do need to backup (and later restore) all those GB's of user files to another drive as the primary partition is reformatted on a fresh install. This can take a long time and you do risk losing something. A better way is to separate your user data files into their own partition, and for future re-installs you make sure to untick the option for formatting this partition. So you would have a / (root) partition as well as a /home (user data files) partition, and thirdly a swap partition. There is nothing stopping you from putting that home partition on a separate hard drive too if you want, but I prefer to keep it on my primary hard drive, and then I run a nightly backup of the /home partition to my second hard drive. A good short tutorial on how to do a new install in this manner for Linux Mint can be found at http://ift.tt/2gauihy. There is another tutorial for Ubuntu (works basically the same) at http://ift.tt/LdYCUl which covers specifically creating a /home partition after installation, but also mentions what you would do on a lter re-install when you already have that separate /home partition.
Comments