Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

ArchC4t · 2024-05-12 10:21:30

I see a lot of very mixed messaging about this online, from people saying it's really useful in case something goes wrong so you can reinstall the OS more easily, to people saying it's outdated info, so I'd like to ask about my specific case:
My PC has two M.2 slots and I need to dual boot with Windows for VR games, meaning one will be used for Arch, while the other will be used for Windows

Regarding this setup, I have four questions:
1. Are there even any advantages to separation nowadays?
2. If so, are the advantages of separating the home directory good enough for it to be reasonable to put / on a SATA SSD?
3. Could I squeeze it into a partition on the Windows drive? I heard Windows has a habit of deleting your bootloader if it's on the same drive, so that sounds iffy, if that info is up to date.
4. If I had two slots open for drives with Linux and I put / and /home on their own drives, wouldn't that be an M.2 slot wasted on something that couldn't possibly fill even just a 250GB drive, even with /swap on the / drive? (although it's not like a 250GB drive wouldn't be a waste of an M.2 slot either)

If any of you have experience with similar situations, or just the general topic, I'd love to get some insights, thank you! :D

SimonJ · 2024-05-12 11:11:46

I am no Arch expert but in the old days, with distros with release cycles, the separate home would be useful if you needed to reinstall, if the distro release was so different you could wipe the root partition, reinstall and then mount home and everything was still there. Arch is a rolling release so that shouldn't matter and you should have working backups anyway. If you have a spare SSD use it for the backup not the home partition.
As I say, I am not an expert and others may give a different view, at the end of the day you need to review the options and make your own decision.

FishBoneEK · 2024-05-12 17:07:48

I use a seperated home partition, though it was because there was a period of time when I switch distros a bit frequently. I think I will keep it that way, in case I want to try another distro next time, so that I can use the same home folder. (I expect unexpected though, since there can be some conflicts)

Trilby · 2024-05-12 17:20:34

There is no best practice about this, there never was. There are pros and cons and they haven't changed 'nowadays': they're just as valid as they ever were. The question is what do you want out of your system and which will serve your goals better.

Physical device sizes can be relevant to this decision (unless you pool the devices and divvy them up via LVM or similar): /home can continue growing and get quite large if you collect personal data, media, documents, etc, while a root (/) partition is not going to see a whole lot of growth over time: the space it needs is dictated far more by your software preferences than the age of the installation. But again, this hasn't really changed over time.

EDIT: I suppose one factor may have decreased in importance over the ages: it is pretty trivial now to have online / offsite backups of personal data, media content, and configs that are easy to restore. So maintaining this content across a reinstall or distro-switch may be less important if you maintain such backups of your personal content.

Last edited by Trilby (2024-05-12 17:23:30)

mesaprotector · 2024-05-12 17:21:31

ArchC4t wrote:

4. If I had two slots open for drives with Linux and I put / and /home on their own drives, wouldn't that be an M.2 slot wasted on something that couldn't possibly fill even just a 250GB drive, even with /swap on the / drive? (although it's not like a 250GB drive wouldn't be a waste of an M.2 slot either)

You likely wouldn't put / and /home on their own drives in that case, but have separate / and /home partitions on one drive, and /home/ArchC4t/media (or something) on the other.

I don't bother separating / and /home anymore, but I do boot from a 118GB drive, so I keep my media folder on a partition on the larger drive that Windows also occupies.

ArchC4t · 2024-05-12 20:28:32

mesaprotector wrote:

ArchC4t wrote:
4. If I had two slots open for drives with Linux and I put / and /home on their own drives, wouldn't that be an M.2 slot wasted on something that couldn't possibly fill even just a 250GB drive, even with /swap on the / drive? (although it's not like a 250GB drive wouldn't be a waste of an M.2 slot either)
You likely wouldn't put / and /home on their own drives in that case, but have separate / and /home partitions on one drive, and /home/ArchC4t/media (or something) on the other.
I don't bother separating / and /home anymore, but I do boot from a 118GB drive, so I keep my media folder on a partition on the larger drive that Windows also occupies.

Oh, I see! Would the separate partition provide the same advantages as a separate drive would, besides being able to just swap the /home drive between systems? If so, that seems like the perfect solution, more or less.

libXq · 2024-05-12 20:41:01

In my personal opinion, it just adds more complexity to the boot process. As already mentioned, there is excellent software available for backup to prevent data loss or manage data in general. Years ago, there were various reasons to separate the home partition from the rest, whether due to storage limitations or the ability to optimize storage allocation on spinning disks, an older storage type. Or perhaps during the deployment process, not taking /home into account to some extent. However, the argument that a person capable of partitioning a drive in this manner and making storage decisions by reducing the size for / may not truly need this separation, likely because they can alter the installation process to avoid deletion or overriding. There may also be some sort of incompatibility for the average user, mainly because configuration files located in /home will carry over. For advanced users, this is not an issue as they often alter their config files in nonetheless, but for the average user, it might lead to incompatible configurations after deploying another OS or version of the OS. Another point worth noting is that you could also mount a portable storage device to /home, but for this, you don't need the separation.

Last edited by libXq (2024-05-12 20:54:41)

ArchC4t · 2024-05-13 06:20:30

libXq wrote:

In my personal opinion, it just adds more complexity to the boot process. As already mentioned, there is excellent software available for backup to prevent data loss or manage data in general. Years ago, there were various reasons to separate the home partition from the rest, whether due to storage limitations or the ability to optimize storage allocation on spinning disks, an older storage type. Or perhaps during the deployment process, not taking /home into account to some extent. However, the argument that a person capable of partitioning a drive in this manner and making storage decisions by reducing the size for / may not truly need this separation, likely because they can alter the installation process to avoid deletion or overriding. There may also be some sort of incompatibility for the average user, mainly because configuration files located in /home will carry over. For advanced users, this is not an issue as they often alter their config files in nonetheless, but for the average user, it might lead to incompatible configurations after deploying another OS or version of the OS. Another point worth noting is that you could also mount a portable storage device to /home, but for this, you don't need the separation.

Speaking of good backup tools, are there any you'd recommend? I've seen Pika-backup be recommended as something very effective and easy to use, but more recommendations never hurt!

Nikolai5 · 2024-05-13 09:23:44

As others have said it's a pros and cons situation and the answer really is "it's up to you".

I've always preferred the simplicity of having a single partition. I've never in all my years using Linux had an issue with losing data in /home and find that a simple backup via rsync to an external drive more than suffices if I want to reinstall or install another OS at some point. The backup method also allows me to pick and choose which config files I care about and which ones I don't, whereas if you keep your /home partition after a fresh install it isn't exactly so "fresh", you'll still have the work of figuring out what you want to keep or not.

I just don't like to care about thinking how much space I want to allocate to / vs /home and end up wasting space in one or the other or worse, not having enough, which we've seen plenty of threads on here about.
This is my rsync query to backup to an external drive. I don't compress, and the external drive is formatted to ext4 so permissions, etc are maintained.

rsync --archive -vh --delete --ignore-existing --exclude-from='exclude-list.txt' ~/ /run/media/[i]username[/i]/WD\ Backup/Storage\ Backup

I just run that every now and again as my physical backup and use the exclude-list.txt file to limit what is brought over to only things I care about.

"Keep it simple, stupid"

Edit: Please note that the command above contains the --delete flag, and to not just run it without due care. I use it so that files are deleted from my backup if I delete them from my PC, it also as a by-product deals with renaming or moving of files and so eliminates duplicates. But if you for example got the source and target directories the wrong way around, and your source was empty, you'd delete everything from the target.

Last edited by Nikolai5 (2024-05-13 09:28:14)

Arch Linux

#1 2024-05-12 10:21:30

Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#2 2024-05-12 11:11:46

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#3 2024-05-12 17:07:48

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#4 2024-05-12 17:20:34

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#5 2024-05-12 17:21:31

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#6 2024-05-12 20:28:32

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#7 2024-05-12 20:41:01

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#8 2024-05-13 06:20:30

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

#9 2024-05-13 09:23:44

Re: Is it still good practice to use a separate drive for /home?

Board footer