Hi, I was recently rudely awakened to some of instabilities of OS Linux 2007, when after being forced to restart due to aafter system freeze, it would no longer boot. It was asking me to open some file which i don't remember.

I felt confident that I wont loose any data since all my stuff was in the home partition which I thought wrongly was a seperate partition to root. Now I realize home is a child partition of root and if I wipe root I loose home. My question is does that not defeat the whole idea of linux stability?

In windows the idea of partitions is that you can have a C and a D partition. If anything happens the user can safely wipe c and reinstall windows keeping all data safe on d.?

Please help me avoid this type of loss data in linux.

backup

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Steve Stites

I don't quite get what your asking, but I thought you could indeed set up separate partitions for /usr, /home etc.. - it sounds like your system is only one partition though?

Can't you try using a live-cd like knoppix or similar to recover the data?

I have three partitions. /swap has 1.5 gigs, root has 10 gigs and rest of my hard drive is allocated to /home which is 48 gigs approx.

Linux seems to have a hierarchical file system. So if root becomes corrupt and linux needs reinstalling /home partition is doomed. Or at least that's my very limited understanding.

Whereas in windows you could have D partition untouched by any failure in C.

My query was how to conduct backups without neccesrrily having conduct backups to external devices on a nightly basis. As a newbie I would greatly appreciate a detailed guide.

jailbait's one word response is the kind of thing that will discourage folks who love to abandon windows but find remarks like this unhelpful at best and condescending at worst.

Wrong!
If you don't touch the partition and it is still formatted ext3, you'll be able to access it after a re-installation of the / partition. During a re-install you can choose one of two directions:
1: Leave /home as part of root and mount the old /home as data partition.
2: Use custom partitioning during install and specify the old /home partition as /home but use a different user name, then as root you can transfer the data from old user to new.

I sympathize, because I remember when I first got into unix, that was an issue that took a little while to get my head around.

The root file system indeed provides the hierarchical directory structure within which everything is accessed. However, in the root partition, /home is just a directory which serves as a mount point. Your partition for /home is a real partition, and it gets mounted on that mount point. This actually makes the directory structure in unix/linux easier to navigate, because you can have very complex collections of partitions, and, once mounted, they can be easily naviagated beginning at root.

One of my Sun servers has something like 30 drives broken out into maybe 120 partitions, and that's probably not large in terms of enterprise systems. The drives are all configured with the format command, and the mounting of the partitions into the directory structure is all defined in /etc/vfstab. Linux systems may be slightly different but will be conceptually the same -- check `man mount` and follow from there.

Backup -- one word (from jailbait) intended to point you at a fork in the road. There is a huge amount of material on this, but you could start by browsing through http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup