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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!

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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.

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  • Great! Thank you so much for your insightful answers.
    – user439047
    Aug 12, 2015 at 19:55
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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:

  1. Having an encrypted Home.

  2. Using LVM.

  3. 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.

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