I've heard it may not be such a good idea; but then again, it keeps your home folder backed up in case disaster strikes...

What do you think?

Thanks in advance

Yes, it's a good idea. But it doesn't keep your home backed-up, merely isolated. You still need to institute a good backup strategy.

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[obviously] it depends on the usage. If you store your personal/important data in /home/<user> you find it (separation) very useful. You will be able to reinstall/repair/upgrade the OS without problems. Backup is another level of security (and is a very good idea too). Just in case your original storage dies.

If you share that /home/<user> across multiple distros it can have quirks with how $HOME/.config/ things change with versionings. Otherwise it's a good idea, especially if the /home/ is on a different storage device. Perhaps the faster device since browser cache on a slow device will impact perceived performance. And perhaps usability.

I separate out the user that does torrents (distro images) because grabbing lots of little chunks and doing random writes has a noticeable performance impact on all other users using the same device. Plus I can give it a bigger device and keep my base installation in < 32GB with multiple users, multiple games, and usage > 3 months before a nuke and pave.

Having home on it's own device is not a backup. Although you can have greater redundancy if that other device(s) is a ZFS mirror. Depends on what performance trade-offs you're willing to make. I mostly keep all my stuff on / on a single device, but do a fresh install on a new device after a few months, leaving the old device as a backup / archive of sorts. For the one user that I do keep separate, it's not automated and I have to be careful to mount that other device and /home/ mount point BEFORE I log into that user.

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Having a separate /home allows for you to re install in case of emergency, & to upgrade your system easily - but do keep a backup (kept elsewhere) of your personal files updated regularly, just in case.

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Determined by use case for me. If you only ever use one DE and don't distro hop, then yes it's a great idea to keep a separate /home. However if you use multiple distros commonly on the same machine you would be better served by a data partition with folders symlinked into /home/"$USER". The actual /home and dotfiles would be on each distros installation. The many de settings from various versions and de's will confuse the system, and ultimately become more trouble than it's worth when stuff starts getting messed up. Speaking from experience. Depending on what you use this may or may not be a problem.

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A separate /home partition works incredibly well using "Timeshift" as a backup.
/home is safe during restores.
And if you want to take the time you can back up the whole shebang.

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I allow /home to be part of the / partition, but rarely use it..... which could be lost if/when either disaster strikes or I distro hop.

Whatever data I have/keep goes on a separate partition with a different name. sda4 could be called /hat, and sdb3 could be called /coat, and the folders inside each partition are names, but could be anything.

Neither of which is safe if disaster strikes the distro on that particular HDD.

As for having the partition holding my data backed up, that is on an external hard drive. Which is backed up regularly (weekly). So when disaster strikes, after fixing the problem, I simply copy the data on my external drive back to the relevant installed HDD.

The way I keep my data backed up is by using the rsync command.

To learn more about backing up your data using rsync, read this link. https://www.howtogeek.com/427480/how...-linux-system/

Could you please explain to me, why you need to reinstall your base installation?

I tend to run my distro as long as there are no real issues with it. I was under the impression that when you keep updating the system, you could easily have it running for a longer time. However on my laptops, sometimes they develop little quirks I can't explain.

Short answer: paranoia

USB devices, which I use almost exclusively, were not meant to be used as OS drives with logging and browser cache that do a lot of writes, deletes, and such. They wear out. So to stay ahead of that curve I just do a fresh install (on a fresh device). It also helps keep me current on how to do a fresh install. Instead of trying to remember what I did five years ago, it's more like what I did 3 to 6 months ago. Since IT isn't my day job (this decade) and it's not something that I do everyday.

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I do it so I can easily re-install the OS, without having to reload my home/data folders. But I've been using a rolling-release for a while now, so that's less of an issue. Whenever a 'major' version (like CentOS 7 to 8) upgrade is in order, I *ALWAYS* format/reload, rather than do an in-place upgrade. Far fewer gremlins afterward.

My desktop and home machines are rolling-release, but our servers and any we do for clients we structure the same way...home (and any data volumes) are always separate partitions at the least, if not their own physical drives.

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I always put /home on a separate disk but a partition works as well. There is no reason I can think of why putting /home on a separate disk or partition would NOT be a good idea. After all, you only care about your data - the OS is inconsequential. An OS (with a few exceptions) can be reinstalled in a few minutes.

As others have mentioned, back up your data no matter where it resides.

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One extra point is that /home is not just your data but (unlike Windows) all your configuration. If you ever have to re-install the system or switch to a different distro, software will still work as it used to. One computer I had went through Fedora, Debians, and CentOS with the same /home for nearly a decade.

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Personal application or DE/WM configurations, not base OS configurations. Those are never in the user's /home. I normally back up any key files I have changed in /etc or other locations so I can restore them if needed.

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NOT a good idea? I'd love to see the reference(s) that claim that.

Having separate filesystem for "/home" has been encouraged by many since the earliest days of Linux. I can recall HOW-TOs that urged users to have a separate "/home" partition (or disk) that date back to the mid '90s---I know I was doing that back when there were Red Hat systems that could run on a mere 16MB of RAM.

Other than the laziness in not having to run fdisk/gparted/whatever, I can't imagine there being any advantage to mingling operating system and user data in the same filesystem. Heck, even using something like btrfs where one can define separate subvolumes, I'd physically separate OS from user data using different disks.

Just my US$0.02...

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