I would like to find any answers to this so I can pass it on to my Linux friends. I personally do not have a separate home partition. I know this forum has many very experienced Linux users that would be able to share this with me.

What could go wrong having a home partition ?

thanks,
OBnascar

Users don't pay attention to available space, fill up drive and if it's within /, when / fills up with space, things start to break or stop working.

Of course, that's a disadvantage of *NOT* having a separate /home partition. Disadvantage of having a separate partition? (1) slight additional complication in disk setup and management, (2) picking the size so that you don't run out of room for your users. If you don't use a separate partition and want to protect / from being overrun you can institute quotas instead.

There are more advantages of having a separate /home partition than disadvantages.
having a separated partition to /home, helps in more aggressives upgrades (a.k.a changing distro), helps in making backups with ufsdump, helps in migrating data to a new disk, helps in protect your data in case of a fatal failure in any other point of the disk, you can have a different policy for quotas in /home and another policy for the other(s) partition(s), blah, blah, blah....

Keep various parts of your system separated via partitions is strongly advised. On my server I have /var (holds www stuff) as a separate partition. On my laptop that dual boots I also keep /boot (for grub boot loader settings) as its own 50mb partition. On all system I obviously keep /home on its own partition. Makes switching distro, reinstalling or fixing much easier. Most Linux file systems have decent support for resizing so space allocation shouldn't be too much trouble...

If it fails to mount for some reason, then users won't be able to log in KDE (and won't be able to use a lot of other things).
Other than that - nothing can go wrong, I think.

It might be slightly slower, but that depends on the layout of the disk.

In general, I think that there enough advantages to a separate home partition that I always do it. I certainly wouldn't get worried about the few slight disadvatages in the face of the real advatages (ease of upgrading, ability to set up the partitions with filesystem types and characteristics as required, possible 'insurance' against runaway disk destruction).

It was pehaps different when disk used to be very small and disk space was in very short supply; then there was an argument for fewer partitions, because that made partition sizing easier.

My biggest concern with using a separate partition for /home is that I sometimes have multiple distros installed at the same time. I don't want my hidden files in my ~ directory to conflict between distros, because my configs may be different.

What I do is have a separate /files partition. In that partition I create a directory for each user. Then I put a link within each user's ~ directory to their directory in /files. That way all of the dot files are contained within the / partition for each specific distro, but the user files are in the partition that is common to all distros.

In addition, I export /files so all of the boxes on the network can mount it. Users have the same ~/files directory wherever they happen to log on.

And even then, any partition could fail to mount correctly. If all your /home data is on the same partition as your root, then you'd just lose access to everything if / didn't mount corrrectly.

Your home partition is given in /etc/passwd. If you are installing different distro's on one machine, you could add a suffix to your home directory reflecting the distro.

/home/dgregory-fc9/
/home/dgregory-suse/
/home/dgregory-ubuntu/

So you could have the same username but differently named home directories. Also keep in mind that your UID might differ between different distro's. SuSE starts with 1000, while FC and Mandriva start at 500.
Mandriva creates a default group by the same name as the user and uses that as the default. SuSE uses "users" as the default group. I prefer the former and do this manually in SuSE.

If you unify your UID and default GID in each distro, you could have a main distro that you normally use contain your Documents and downloads subdirectory and then have symbolic links for the other distro's Documents & downloads directories point to the main one.
/home/dgregory-suse/Documents -> /home/dgregory-fc9/Documents.

This can avoid replicating the same documents in each distro or having to search through each of your home directory because you saved a document in a different distro.

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The main disadvantage in having each distro with it's own /home directory is fragmenting the amount of space available. Having one /home partition will allow you to have a larger /home partition.

Another candidate for a common partition is /tmp. Configure each distro to clean out /tmp when rebooting. Then use the same /tmp partition.

Of course you only need one swap partition. If you want to use suspend to disk, you need it to be at least equal to the size of your ram. The "resume=" entry in the kernel boot line references the swap partition to wake up from.

To be honest, I can't think of any reasonable objection to a separate home partition. You could always object on the basis of increased complication in certain (and very specific) administrative tasks. Of course, how many people are really using "dump(8)" these days -- I do but I am a weirdo at times. And almost all other utilities are capable of spanning mount-points without issue... although they may require certain options. In my opinion, I often desire the ease of segregation between system and user data that comes naturally with partitions.


Also, in very rare circumstances... you may fail to mount the /home directory and then create a large file in /home on the / partition... and later find your / directory full but not be able to find the file(s) causing it because /home is mounted on top of the directory and hides the problem. This happens occasionally... although it is often intentional. When I was in college, this was part of the checklist we had when looking at full partitions or when suspicious activity was suspected on a workstation that someone had mount/umount ability on.

I re-format my machine a lot. I think because I like always having a clean system. That being said. I have a Seagate 750GB drive. Having a seperate /home partition means that I can wipe my system and not mess with my /home data. I can reformat my entire system and not lose any of my data. Keep in mind many programs on the / file system may have hidden files saved on your home directory.

Just take a look and do ls -la ~/

- Carlos

Oh yeah man... I have dotfiles dating back over 3 years in my home directory (and really dating back 8 but I got a new main drive in the machine 3 years ago and didn't preserve modification time on it). I haven't needed to recreate those files because I have been keeping the same home directory for all these years.

It really makes it so much easier to upgrade or change the base system without causing headaches on the user side. My step-mother has gone through 3 major number revisions (of FreeBSD) without noticing because her home directory has never been touched. The only changes she's noticed are in better looking and better behaving programs. Her data and preferences have never vanished. In fact, she hasn't done any configuration of her machine since the first day when we set it up together.

Also... as a side note... her hard drive (from the original machine) did fail. And it failed pretty dramatically... losing whole areas of the drive and making several partitions inaccessible. But luckily, not the /home partition. After several hours, I was able to preserve every personal file she had on the machine. Had I used one big partition, I would have never gotten that lucky break and she would have lost data that was irreplaceable (unbacked up images of her recently deceased father).

I don't have a separate /home partition, I have a separate /home drive.

Every now and then, for one reason or another, I rearrange my system. I have five internal hard drives, and usually the rearrangement is done to take better advantage of the drives that are in the box. Having /home separate from the system and from everything else makes that rearrangement a lot more convenient.

Though I must say that this /home drive came about as part of a rearrangement a few years ago, and I was lazy at the time and just symlinked /home from the system partition to the new drive. Never got around to changing that; it is still symlinked - even though since then the /home drive has itself been reorganized (used to be two partitions with one being home, now is just one big chunk...all /home) and the system has been moved to another (larger, faster) drive.

One of these days, I might update fstab. Might not, too; the symlink works fine...

if you don't have any /home partition and /home is within / directory then you should define some user quotas, I think after that you won't run behind space.


but its better to have a /home partition

thanks

shahz