Arch Linux

sorincom

Member

Registered: 2019-12-20

Posts: 2

Mounted home folder to new partition, where are the old files?

Hi guys,

I moved my home folder to a separate partition:

- created the partition
- mounted at /newhome
- rsynced everything under /home to /newhome
- remounted the partition to /home
- rebooted

Everything is fine, except a little thing: my root partition seems to still contain the files of the old home, as the free space reported by Disks is unchanged (while the used space reported by Disk Usage Analyzer decreased with the size of the home folder, which is a bit weird). So, here's my question: where did the old /home go? I'd like to delete those files.

Thank you!

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,097

Re: Mounted home folder to new partition, where are the old files?

It is hidden underneath the filesystem mounted at /home.
If you unmount /home the directories contents can then be removed.

sorincom

Member

Registered: 2019-12-20

Posts: 2

Re: Mounted home folder to new partition, where are the old files?

Perfect, thank you.

As I scratched a bit my head about how to unmount the home dir, I'll leave this in case it might help others.

- reboot
- do not login!
- in login screen: Ctrl-Alt-F2 (will open TTY)
- login as root
- execute umount /home
- execute mv /home /oldhome
- reboot
- login normally

Now the old files can be found under /oldhome.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 19,097

Re: Mounted home folder to new partition, where are the old files?

mv /home /oldhome

Means there will be no home directory on the system.  On next boot the home.mount service created it before mounting /home.