If I were to copy all of my home folders to another hard drive then created sym links to the new location all data save would go to the second drive correct?

Consider what a "symbolic link" actually is. "It's a very-tiny disk file which has a file-name in it." When Linux sees that you've used a symlink in your file-reference, it simply grabs that file-name and substitutes it, then tries once again to find the target file or directory.

With regard to home folders, I think that a wiser approach would be to update the user-definition to point directly to the new home-folder location. I'm not persuaded that Linux will honor a symbolic reference to the user's "home." (I anticipate that it might make an exception, in the name of security ...)

As an experiment, make one dummy user, then move his home-directory, update the user to point to the new location, and verify that it worked. (The user should not be logged-on at the time.)

1 members found this post helpful.

You don't want to do this. You are going to want to update your /etc/fstab so that /home is mounted from the second drive. You can copy or move the contents over to a directory, like /home.bak and then copy it in to your newly mounted /home on your second drive.

Yes, use the usermod command to alter the location of you home directory. Use the -m option so it will move your current home contents to the new location.

If you're unsure, create a test user account and perform the command to verify how things happen.

so usermod -d -m then path to new drive?

Yes, that is correct. As previously suggested, make a new temporary user, execute this command, and verify it operates as expected so there will be no surprises. You'll also have to use "sudo" because this should be performed as root.

To clarify: "the path to the new home directory on the new drive."

Specify the complete path to where the home directory is now to be located.

The user should not be logged-in at the time. If so, s/he should log off and log back in.

The -m option creates the new directory if there isn't one according to the man? I was going to do this last night but go distracted try to figure out why x suddenly decided it wanted to start locking up randomly