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I am making a 10G partition "/" (root) partition that will contain my Ubuntu OS and the rest of the drive will be the "/home" with the music, home, download, etc...folders. (that come originally.....)

Do those general folders go directly on the /home partition?

I mean if I make a / and a /home partition....that means that one day when I wanna reinstall Ubuntu, I'll just need to do it on the / partition and all the data that is on /home (in the download, home, music...etc folders) will stay there after the installation. Am I right?

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Root (/) is the root of the entire filesystem to which other directories can be mounted in various branches of the filesystem. One of these branches is /home/, and in this directory, individual users have a "home directory" using their username. In your home directory are all your personal directories such as music, documents, etc.

In theory, you can keep your home directory, but a lot of preferences, etc, are stored there, and will remain even if not used. When you install a new version, you would specify your /home partition to be mounted in the new installation and it will use it just as if it were not separate.

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    Thanks for the info. You are saying that it is much better to have the /home partition formated and clean then?
    – Elysium
    Jul 12, 2012 at 19:16
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    No, I don't know which is better, really; I think it depends on the individual. There can be tradeoffs either way, and I've seen very knowledgeable people recommend for and against separate partitions. I personally have a separate partition that contains pictures, documents, music, etc, and I mount this partition for every installation (I often have several). I then just create symbolic links to various directories of this in my home directory. For example /home/documents is a link to /mnt/shared/documents. Jul 12, 2012 at 20:11

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