I'm trying to strategize my ubuntu installation. I've always read that separating the /home directory makes it easier when it comes to upgrading your distro. But could somebody please explain why? I'm trying to determine if it would be worth it. Thanks!
2 Answers
The main reason used to be so that you can format /
and not format /home
. Nowadays it does not matter any more: the installer lets you keep your /home
.
There are still a few good reasons:
if
/
gets full over something like 95% the filesystem starts to store parts of files not together (ie. defragmentation) so performance will take a small hit.When
/
is 100% full you will have a harder time logging it due to the system not being able to use the free space effectively.So a separate
/home
where you store your personal data will keep your/
as empty as possible unless you have a server (apache, mailserver and mysql store their userdata by default in/var
).A separate
/home
also allows for encryption of just that partition.- If
/home
is on an actual different hard disc you can pull it out and put into another system that holds a/
and use that.
In that respect depending on your needs and what your system is used for it might be better to create a separate /data
partition, have /var/www/html
symlink to /data/var/www/html
so your websites are on the data disk, change the default database location for mysql
to point to /data/var/mysql/
and symlink your /home/$USER/
directories (aka. Desktop, etc). to /data/home/{dirs}
.
If /data
is an actual disk you could take it out of your system, place it into an upgraded Ubuntu and continue working on it. Besides maybe a little snag here and there (like settings that got removed from mysql
or apache
) you could have a new system with all your data up and running in a single reboot and the time it takes to insert the disk into that new machine.
I do that a lot with my notebooks.
There is no need to have a separate /home
partition for general use on a desktop system.
This is a kind of "tradition" to have it as a separate partition. There is almost no difference when you re-install.
The reasons to have it separate are, but not limited to:
Having an encrypted Home.
Using LVM.
Having a different file system, like XFS for Home.
There may be other reasons that I cannot recall right now.
But if you already have installed with /home
on the same partition as /
, it is not worth the effort to change it anyway.
Disadvantage of having it separate is that you will always have to waste some space on your /
.
But as a bottom line I can say that there is almost no difference.