Fresh installation without losing /home directory?

Question

I am running ubuntu 11.10 32bit. I have separate / and /home partitions. I want to go back to Ubuntu 10.04. How can I do this without losing my /home partition. Basically I want to save my preferences and all the settings I have saved, my emails accounts and other stuff. I have also setup github and bitbucket setup in this /home partition.

Answer 1

While installing , install Ubuntu in "/" partition as usual and dont format /home partition. It will remain as it is (By the way I made the assumption that by "/home" you mean your home directory)

And one more thing that you need to do is it should be indicated to the installer that you want to mount that particular partition under /home.

Answer 2

I do it the other way around. I have a single partition, but while freshly installing a new version of Linux, I just copy the /home and paste it after a fresh install.

And voila all settings are resorted back as my old installation.

WARNING : It sometimes can cause problem with certain applications. eg. recently I reverted back to 10.04 from the latest 11.10, which caused rhythmbox to cause some anomalous behavior, since it couldn't save the media library.