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I have large archive and other huge development files currently in my home directory and would like to move them out to another location to make backup and migration to new systems easier.
Is there a standard practice for having external user files placed in somewhere like /usr/local/<archive name>? Other than just creating the directory and chown <user>:<group> to myself?
Personally, I create a directory called "Mo" in root ... short for "Mo' stuff". That way, if I want to make a backup of everything EXCEPT for "Mo' stuff", I can specify /???* to only backup stuff with 3+ letters.
It's a simple but effective method, since every "normal" thing in the root directory has at least 3 letters in its name.
Within "Mo", I'll create different directories owned by whoever they need to be owned by.
Is free space a consideration? Is it one partition or do you have a separate /(root) and home? I might consider creating a separate partition and using /mnt/something
Is free space a consideration? Is it one partition or do you have a separate /(root) and home? I might consider creating a separate partition and using /mnt/something
Likely. Either a different partition or drive eventually. For now I have more than enough space.
My main concern is that there is some sort of unix(or Slackware) convention that I don't know about that assumes all user files are always under /home.
I don´t know about a standard practice, this is probably handled a million ways.
But there is at least one standard that I know of: the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard published by The Linux Foundation.
What you're describing might fall naturally under section 3.17, the /srv tree, which is reserved for locally-organized file collections, including source repositories. For more information on the standard: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org...s/ch03s17.html
You would of course have to provide enough space, perhaps by mounting a volume there.
Don't worry, there's no such convention. Back in the old old days of *nix, before symlinks or even easy resizing of partitions, stuff was just crammed wherever it would fit basically.
I don´t know about a standard practice, this is probably handled a million ways.
But there is at least one standard that I know of: the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard published by The Linux Foundation.
What you're describing might fall naturally under section 3.17, the /srv tree, which is reserved for locally-organized file collections, including source repositories. For more information on the standard: https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org...s/ch03s17.html
You would of course have to provide enough space, perhaps by mounting a volume there.
Stuff that's not personally for me (as the user) I move under /srv. There is my ftp root with things sorted by purpose. /srv is its own partition. There's places for config files, source, binaries, etc.
I have large archive and other huge development files currently in my home directory and would like to move them out to another location to make backup and migration to new systems easier.
Is this because you only want to backup the directory structures that you move out from $HOME or is it because you want to keep $HOME small to make it easier to backup? Regardless of answer to that question symbolic links are really useful.
I have most files not needed to run the system stored in an external USB SSD in a directory mounted as /data. I put also there hidden directories files like .mozilla, .thunderbird , .gnupg and .purple that I can share among systems through symlinks. Additionally I backup $HOME there. Then I backup /data in both an internal and an USB HDDs. I do all backups with rsync. I have in my TODO list to use restic instead of rsync, but I am lazy.
Last edited by Didier Spaier; 01-05-2024 at 09:40 AM.
Reason: Typo fix.
I have my own top-level directory named "archive", for files that might be shared between users. It's mostly media, so there are subdirs /archive/music, /archive/video, etc.
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