Maybe I should clarify. I use a separate /home partition. I just typed too fast. It should have read: "This is exactly why I keep a separate partition for /home directory."
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From: Oren Beck Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 1:03 PM To: Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
On 1/4/07, Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO <> wrote:
This is exactly why I keep a separate /home directory. You can always slap it in another system and copy it over or wipe the other partitions and reinstall and all your crap is still there. Some of your dot files may need to be deleted, but should still work with newer program versions. You shouldn't need /var unless you put stuff like your website in there or files for FTP or mail files. Since I use web mail and have FTP directory on another drive that is not a problem. I only save /home before a new system load. And I do back that up prior to reload, usually. I've only had to save it from the dead once by breathing life back into the partition table, but then I like a good resurrection every now and then.
This is getting plugged in here at a later date due to sober deliberation. I am going to raise a proposal here that will also be used to begin a different thread- but is quite on topic here. If one is doing a migration from one distro to another that seems a good point in time to add a "userdata" drive. My admittedly painful lack of detailed "how to" not being of issue here, What's involved in copying /home, /var and anything else liable to have unique "userdata" in it to a new drive, and setting partitions to have the physical location/s be keeping OS on one drive and "your data" on another drive? Would not having "your data" safe on a totally separate device lower the worry factor of migrations? And it would seem that Gentoo power users doing frequent emerge updates would have lower risk of losing "their data" Or am I far wrong?