Preserving Home.
 

A question for all you slackers. I'm about to upgrade from 14.0 to 14.1 and I want to do a full install oppose to an upgrade but at the same time I want to preserve my /home partition. I have lots of photos, videos, etc,.. that I like to keep and moving them would be a pain. How can I do this? Is there a way to stop the formating process when I specify a pre-existing /home path during the Slackware setup installation process?

I do it like this, not mounting of /home during install, leaf it untouched by the installer
install everything into /, when system is done, ad the existing /partition to fstab to mount to home.
and I always rename ~/user and start from scratch
then, when this is done, create the user.
but a backup is always a good idea, just in case ...

If you have, say, / on /dev/hda2 and /home on /dev/hda6, there will be no problem. You should only format / and
select / for installation leaving /home alone. This is how I replaced my old Debian with Slackware a few years ago.
You will find convenient to do a tar czvf etc.tgz /etc mv etc.tgz /home (or copy etc.tgz to a USB pendrive) before
reinstalling. This will allow you to recreate easily your configuration files post installation.

I make two partitions, one for home and one for everything else. Then, after backups of course, I unmount home, upgrade the rest and then add home back to fstab

Bear in mind that depending on you computer's usage you could need to keep stuff not in /home. As an example, I've learned how to loose a local website or a MySQL database forgetting that :-)

Also, making a backup of the whole /home directory, for instance on an USB hard disk is a possible alternative to putting it on a dedicated partition.

I used to copy /home over to another computer; now I use a separate /home partition as enine described, but I still back it regularly to another computer since I figured out rsync.

Make sure you get the hidden dot-config directories and files--you don't need them all, just the ones you have modified. Any ones that you have left in their default state don't need to be backed up. In my case, that includes my .pan2 directory, for the newsgroup store; the .fluxbox directory and .E directory for Fluxbox and E17 configuration; and so on.

To build on what Didier Spaier said, there may be other files, not in /home, that you would want to back up--any config files that you have modified from their default state. For example, I back up /etc/samba/smb.cnf and /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall. I've been recycling and tweaking the same smb.conf file since I first figured out one that worked for me about six year ago.

My partitioning was pretty much static for 4-5 years; I've only simplified it in the last year or so.

/home always had a separate partition. And anytime a new release came out it was simply a matter of formatting /, /var, /tmp, and leaving /home untouched at the partition selection stage.

The only issue there might be are the user-specific configuration files hidden in .local, .config, and so on.

Thats how I've been running got years, one partition for /home and its rsynced either to another drive or across the network. Then everything else on another partition. If I upgrade slack I just format the other partition and don't let it touch /home during the new install then I'll mount it myself and ass to fstab once I am happy with the new install.

Other times I might upgrade my drive so I'll install Slack clean and make a new /home then copy everything over from the old drive after mounting it in an external enclosure.

Now I have a second system as a 'server' where I put those /home backup drives so I when I rsync its available there as well.
Only thing I need now is a two way rsync in case I ever want to edit from my backup server.

Is there a reason you want to do a full install as oppose to an upgrade?

Take a look at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...5/#post5072001 and see if it helps you. I have more than just root and home partitions but the method would be the same.

Hope this helps some.

If you already have /home on a separate partition, there's no need to "stop" the formatting process during the install. Formatting happens partition by partition, not on the whole disk. Just tell the installer not to format your /home partition.

There's no need to do any of this. The installer can handle it.

I intentionally unmount /home and don't mount it with the installer either. Sure it can handle it but one slip of a finger when I meant to choose use this partition and don't format and accidentally choose format would be annoying.
Also I'll create my user account under the system generated /home then logon and logoff just to make sure everything works as non-root then rename that /home and finally mount my other partition as /home. Unless I've put in a new drive then I'll just use that /home and mount my external and rsync everything over.