On Thu, 5 Jun 2014 12:37:52 Terry Duell wrote:
Traditionally, /home was a separate partition to prevent lusers from filling up the root partition and potentially bringing the server down. Is there any advantage to having a separate /home partition on a Desktop system with only one (or a few) end-users?
I think so, having /home as a separate partition makes distro updates simpler.
If you want to change to a different distribution or use a distribution that has no good support for upgrades then that's the case. If you use a Debian based distribution then you can always upgrade it without doing a reinstall so that's not necessary. Also most distributions support installing without running mkfs, so if you have everything in a single partition then you could just rm -rf everything apart from /home before the installation.
I should add I have a second 500 GB disc that I can use to hold stuff while reformatting my current 500 GB drive.
If you have a spare 500 GB drive, I'd recommend using that instead (and not reformatting your existing 500 GB drive), until you're satisfied with your new setup, say in a few months down the track. You have a rollback option (and a data backup) then if everything goes pear shaped.
Yes, I wouldn't reformat my existing drive until it has all 'settled down'.
500G is small by today's standards. If you use the first 500G of a 1TB disk then it'll be a lot faster than a 500G disk.
Btw, is there any barrier to just doing a fresh install on the SSD, get that partitioned, bootable and running (as part of the installation process), and then mounting your existing 500 GB disk to copy the necessary data across?
Probably no barrier to that approach, but I do have a quite a lot of additional stuff installed. I suspect rsync'ing my system files across may be simpler...not sure.
rsync is simpler for people who have had experience doing some of the unusual things with Linux. If you lack such experience then you'll probably find a fresh install to be simpler. You can copy the configuration files over after a fresh install. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/