If my /home directory is in its own partition, is it safe from being overwritten when formatting old LM17.1 & clean installing 18.1?

And directories like desktop, pdf & Thunderbird are in the /home directory? I can't easily check as not at the pc
Thanks

No. not safe. you could easily format it it during install.
"Something else"... mount at /home - do not format.

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And if you do it that way, it is safe. I do it all the time. However things can still go wrong - note my sig.

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If you say 'format LM17.1', I imagine you mean upgrading the old Linux Mint OS with the new one.
Therefore the LM17.1 OS exists on your current /root partition.

I don't have an OS with /root and /home on 2 different partitions.
However, if you upgrade Mint17 to Mint18 on the /root partition, it is possible that the /root partition will be assigned with a new UUID.
This may mean the upgraded OS can't see your old /home partition.

Hopefully, there are knowledgeable members who can advise further.

But failing that, I would simply suggest save your /home directory onto a separate partition.
Install the new Mint18 OS with a new /root and /home partition.
And then transfer the old /home directory onto your newly installed OS.

Also, you may just need to to do:
to upgrade from Mint 17 to Mint18.

Of course, a lot of Linux Mint people can answer this question very quickly.

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"Formatting" ... anything ... completely erases it.

But if you are simply upgrading, from one version of Linux to another, there's no need to format before doing so. (In fact, you would not do that.)

You can expect that Linux-upgrade procedures will not mess with /home.

Negative. Update Manager is the recommended method.

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My understanding is that as LM17.n is based on Ubuntu 14.04 and that lm18 is based on Ubuntu 16, it is not recommended to upgrade and that a clean install is the correct route.

I have been on the LM-help orc channel where I haven't been helped, which is why i came here - I've always had better luck on LQ than the LM resources.

I haven't been able to copy my home directory safely as xserver is not working (HWE EOL message). I have tried rsync and various sudo CP commands but have not succeeded.

Most of my data is on a separate local disk & NAS, but I would like to recover my thunderbird profile, & a few other folders like downloads, pdf & desktop. As well as my htdocs in lampp.
Thanks

I had another go at sudo cp. I think I had missed the -r flag off. I now appear to have my /home & /opt directories copied successfully.

Before I format the hard disk, are there any other directories worth retrieving?
Thanks

A clean install would be to install from install media, overwriting (formatting) / but being careful not to overwrite /home.

You will need to recreate the same same user names, in the same order as they presently exist.
This is so the first user corresponds to a UID of 1000 and likewise for other users.
You can find the user <-> UID correspondence in /etc/password.

Note that both /etc and /var also contain important configuration data, so if you've configured "stuff" then
you might want to preserve things like crontabs.

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7 years and exactly two /home partitions later...
I still backup to USB using rsync
backups you should have had before this, just sayin' it doesn't help.
But you said /home is its own, so you're only half upside-down.

Good luck, take it slow.

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You would reformat & recreate file systems on selected partitions.
You wouldn't format a whole disk.

please read op's previous thread, most issues have been adressed & answered there.
regarding the question of this thread, i think posts #2 and #3 say it all.

I'm not sure what benefits having /home on a separate partition are - it was recommended on various installation instructions. In my situation (major upgrade from trusty to xenial), what I could expect if it (/home) remains ok, having installed the new OS - should the system pretty much be as it was before, just with a new 'heart' (OS)?

Habitual, lesson learned. Some sort of ordered backup has been on my to-do list, but always later... That said, I occasionally copy my email to NAS and my work/project data from its separate HDD to NAS. I'd like to set up some regular system for this. Your rsync commands need to be run manually or have you set it up to run automatically?

Yes, you can run that command as a user-owned cron.
See something like
This ^^^ is non-functional, on purpose.

IMNSHO:
it makes migration and system changes/upgrades etc. easier on NO GUI systems.
when you have a gui, there's just so much more stuff in your $HOME, and so much that can casue breakage, and many many config files you never even opened, let alone edited yourself,... it can cause a system to fail after login.
therefore, for gui systems i do not recommend a separate /home partition, but rather a separate data partition, with all the large media files and whatnot in it. Some directories can be symlinked to e.g. ~/Documents, ~/Music etc.