Talk:Move home to its own partition

From Linux Mint

Excellent summary

Thanks for the great instructions!

I am on an ubuntu gutsy install & wanted to move /home to it's own partition to ease admin/upgrades. Using your instructions, I had /home moved over in about 20 minutes ... taking my sweet time to be sure I did everything right.

Nice work & thanks again!

Alternative to moving home

There is an alternative to the 'Make partition your new Home' instruction on the main page, it is one I have used for quite a while now and in my opinion it is easier than messing about with fstab and the rest. Firstly you only need to copy your own data files to the new location the hidden configuration files can stay exactly where they are which makes the copy a little easier. You then use symlinks.

If you have a sensible file manager like Xfe or Krusader then creating symlinks is no more difficult than drag and drop - just specify that you want to create a link not copy or move the folder from its origin. If you only have a single pane file manager then you are probably better to use a terminal.

Let us suppose that your original home is called /home/myhome and your new data partition is called /data.

Open a terminal and run:

cd /home/myhome (if it isn't there already)

Now if you want to link to the folder 'Pictures' in /data you run:

ln -s /data/Pictures

and so on until you have links to all your data. (I suppose if you put all subfolders into one folder in /data you could just symlink to that and save even more time although I haven't tried it that way).

When you reinstall you just recreate the symlinks.

If you have never used symlinks before, don't worry, the links behave in exactly the same way as if the folders/files were in their original location of /home/myhome.