[GTALUG] Home Partitions

[Val Kulkov]

On Mon, 27 Aug 2018 at 12:42, Howard Gibson via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

>    I have some time on my hands. :(
>
>    I am doing some website updates, including some Linux install
> instructions I have posted.  I have an old 32_bit laptop here which is now
> a playtoy upon which I can install anything I want.  I have just installed
> Ubuntu, minus all the customization I normally do.  Ubuntu's default
> install is to place root and /home all on the same partition.  My default
> behaviour is to separate them.  I want to be able to blow away the
> operating system and install something else, without disturbing /home.  I
> want to post notes to non-technical new users, and make things as simple as
> possible.
>
>    What do all of you out there think of separate /home partions.
> Necessary?  Not necessary?
>
>    Installing a new OS on a Ubuntu box means backing up and recovering
> /home.  How reliably upgradable is Ubuntu?
>
>
Ubuntu has been my primary desktop OS since Ubuntu 10.04. From 10.04 to
14.04, I attempted to run dist-upgrades a few times and each time had
problems of varying magnitudes. IIRC each time, from 10.04 to 14.04
(including short term support releases) I reverted to making clean installs
with backup and restore of the home partition.

I stopped attempting dist-upgrades at 14.04. Since then, I have been
keeping /root and /home on the same partition. My upgrade process can now
be briefly summarized as follows:

1. Backup contents of /home, or shrink the existing partition containing
/root and /home to a minimum size to make space for a new parition for the
new installation.
2. Install Ubuntu, either on the existing partition (overwriting the
current install) or on the newly created partition.
3. Selectively restore /home, omitting all of the existing dot-files
(hidden files) in /home or migrate from the old partition.
4. Manually restore configs from .local, .config, .gconf and other
dot-files and dot-dirs, paying attention to breaking changes in the config
files. This is by far the most time-consuming and tedious step in my
upgrade process. Unfortunately, I have not yet found a way to automate this
process. New Ubuntu versions often contain upgraded applications with
breaking changes in their config files. I suspect that many of my failures
during dist-upgrades were caused by breaking changes in application configs.

Note that the recent Ubuntu distros do not require a separate swap
partition. Ubuntu 18.04, for one, happily creates a swap file for you
during the installation process. The main benefit of using a swap file
rather than a partition is that it is easy to increase the size of the swap
file if needed.
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