Rather than removing everything under /home ("sudo rm -rf /home/*"), it is much safer to rename the home directory ("sudo mv /home /home~") and then create a separate empty home directory for the mount point ("sudo mkdir /home"). This way, all your data is still under /home~/username. After you've tested everything including automounting the new home directory on the second drive, then you can delete /home~ if you wish.
Okay so following linear left towards right logic, you are saying: type "sudo mv /home /home~" which will move /home to the NEW drive "/home~" then typing "sudo mkdir /home~" will make the new drive file the new directory.
@6:49 - just in case anyone is wondering rsync -x option means 'don't cross filesystem boundaries', so if you happen to have a soft link (or hard link?) file that links to a file on another mount point do not copy those files (on that difference mount point)
For some years now it has been my practice to have the OS install in its own partition, even with only one drive. Allocate one partition of, say, 50GB for the OS, and a second one of the same size, initially left unused. All the rest is for /home. On today’s multi-terabyte drives, this is no big deal. What’s the second OS-sized partition for, you may ask? That’s if you want to try out another distro without wiping out your original OS install. You can point its /home directory at the same one used by the first install, and have all your user files immediately available under the new OS without having to copy them back and forth.
5 років тому+7
I just want to echo what DT pointed out earlier: if it is the /home directory you're moving (or any other directory where config files are kept), it's a good idea to do the entire process in tty, because you can potentially break your system (nothing unfixable, but still, why worry about that). If it is only music or videos or things like that, then it's fine to do it in the GUI. If you don't already know how to edit a text file in tty, learn that first. You can use nano, vim, or even ed, the standard text editor (depending on whether you're a noob, pro, or hacker, respectively). Also, if this is the first time you're doing this, have your /home directory backed up to an external drive, just in case you delete it before actually copying it. That would really be a shame :D In fact, it's a good idea to have your /home directory backed up on an external (unplugged) drive anyway, just in case of a hardware failure or something like that. But that's just common sense.
followed instructions went into TTY, rmed my /home/, had to add a -R as it was not empty :) went to switch back to plasma session made me log in i'd log in and it'd blink and go right back to the login prompt fortunately I remembered /etc/fstab - and it had a comment in it that reminded me the command to get the UUID. Muddled my way through executing the command *from within nano* so I could mark, copy, paste with Nano's horrible default keybindings (I have no /home, so I have no .nanorc) So just from my hairbrained memory, I was able to get my new /home/ filled in on the fstab file. Rebooted and viola! The login loop would've made me super nervous if it hadn't been a fresh install. Just wasn't patient enough to wait for the new drive to arrive before installing :) Thanks, and as always, keep being awesome!
Derek, thanks a lot for such an informative video! Logically, the next one should be about how to configure the fstab file, when different drives (SSD, HHD) are available... e.g. a SSD for the system, and a couple of HDDs for data storage... Once again, minor features and nuancies you describe so well matter!
My old installation used to be symlinked together, I had manually symlinked about half the folders within /home to another drive. It was such a pain when they broke.
I currently have files spread across 3 drives on my main machine. I used to use symlinks to tie it altogether, but this got a little bit irritating when moving around the directory tree caused relative links to misbehave. So lately I have decided to try bind mounts instead.
@11:31 - fstab file the '0' is for 'used by dump tool, 0 meaning don’t dump if filesystem is not present.' and the '2' = used by fsck tool for discovering filesystem check order, this value means check this device after root filesystem.'. source: search online for 'How to Move Home Directory to New Partition or Disk in Linux' and check out the techmint article. UA-cam dosen't seem to like us posting links
Followed the steps, now nothing in my Linux is working, can't open anything, can't click on anything, brother wtf, everything was fine until the deleting process, followed the command, and boom
The instructions worked great. I got lazy, and stopped using the terminal over the last 20 years. Now, I regret it, and am getting back into it again. I'm Getting close to 82 now, so I can use that as an excuse. Back in 2003, I was running Gentoo and loved it, but I got lazy and am now using Pop os
I prefer using a dedicated partition/drive for data files, HOME is mostly for transitory and local packages files. HOME is usually a big source of issues between distros and BSD family!
Thanks - I screwed up my / and made it 10gb instead of 100gb originally, so i redid everything but figured i could be sneaky and keep my /home on the larger partition, but instead it created a new one on root (/). so i essentially wiped the old partition and followed this, along with Jeffrey's comment for safety on keeping /home~ in case of mistakes. nice.
** Thanks Derek!!, this makes switching from Arch back to Ubuntu so much easier! (lol) Gparted is ok, I like KDE Partition Manager better. Love your new pop filter, I was going to suggest the BSW, which is small and clean. You can put it a lot closer to the mic too.
As always: thanks for the great, informative, easy to follow content. :) But: WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I NEEDED TO DO THIS, MAN???? Haha I did this a while back, though I would have preferred to learn how from you :)
Good vid. Isn't an inspection mount to /home (7:08) not needed? It was unmounted soon (8:16). Instead, we could qc-inspect sd[a]1 contents back at /mnt/tmp/ (6:19), especially helped by powerful rsync -c checksum flag?
I was wondering if you could put /boot efi, /root on one disk (sda) ------- /home on other disk (sdb)…I won't be using a swap partition, I'll be making a swap file. This would be at install. I will be using 2 NVMe drives. I used SATA drives in this example but it's still the same.
@DistorTube I would like to thank you for this information.... I would just like to bring it to your attention that the link to this blog article is broken.... I had no problem finding the information on your website but thought you might want to know.... Great information thanks.
Great video. Thank you for the explanation. I would like to just move my music/video/download folders only and not the whole home folder to my separate harddrive. How may I do this ?
Wow! I just did this same thing but just for my /Video folder. Two days ago.... I added a 1tb HDD to the system and it is mounted to my /home/Videos folder... It has the hold drive just for movies.... :-D Now when I reinstall I'll just tell it NOT to format that drive on installation and use that drive for my /Videos folder... Thanks DT LLAP
Cool Stuff DT, I am on the way to my LPIC 1,2,3 Exam. Maybe in about 8 month I will finish this and can get a job in this area? Then, I will contribute to your account. I like your Stuff !!!
in my opinon man, I feel like there is a surge of new linux people trying to rice their WM/DE and what not. what do you think about doing in depth tutorials on config customization explaining why you do what you do in your dotfiles, and throwing them up on your main site maybe even monetize them behind patroen . just a suggestion, keep doing the good the work!
9:39 let me back into the Lock Screen but every time I enter my password the screen goes black and puts me back into the Lock Screen. I’ve tried rebooting through the tty but nothing happens. Please help.
Didn't know that move is such a revelation. I'm using a separate drive for the homedir for years on my laptop. On my desktop the homedir sits on a separate partition, which I unmount when upgrading, etc.
i am gettin glogged out after the reboot ( after making all the changes ) tried 5-6 times watching the video and then ur written instructions on the blog also.
I've already got my home directory on another drive where I want it, so I'm here for the part where it's permanently mounted. Thank you! Question: Are these instructions also for if your home directory is [to be] on the same disk but different partition?
7:06 - /dev/sdb1 is already mounted in /mnt/tmp ( 6:17 ) and what you see in Nemo is different mount point: /media/$USER/$UUID (look in Nemo title bar...)
fair enough, but you can mount drives wherever you want infinitely many times too, so it doesn't really matter what was the mountpoint that nemo found when it's the same drive
id take ntfs for the seperate drive since then i can also use that same drive on a windows installation if i really want to (dual boot systems come to mind) also it could be a good idea to move your syslogs and that kinda stuff somewhere seperate just so that if anything fails you can easily go through them and investigate
I have been doing this on Windows too with each directory for downloads music documents etc. Even for my email profile. Never tried the home folder completely because I could never tell how much space I need and also so that reinstalling will delete all my configs to start fresh. I am diatrohopping with the same distro for a while now. Just moved to kubuntu and looks awesome.
I've only installed Linux on laptops with single drives so far, my main desktop is still windows. This will be very useful when I finally get around to going full Linux. Plus my main laptop can get a M.2 ssd put in it, which I plan on doing, making it a two hard drive machine.
I am getting into using raspberry pis. If you boot from an SD card or flash drive, your boot drive will have very limited space.. Pi OSes also tend to assume they boot on a single drive system. Mounting and additional flash drive can double your storage space. You can also clone that carefully crafted boot device or your data drive. Flash media, SD cards or flash drives have limited write cycle. I have lost data relying on an SD card without proper backups. It was my own writing,. I type very slowly, so that was days of work lost. Please be careful.
I probably have a dumb question but I have not found the answer online. I have a ssd that 250gb and a hdd that is 20tb the ssd has / and my hdd has my /home on it. If I decided to change distros I'm on (Arch base sys) can I switch to a Debian or a Redhat base linux with out without messing up the app or data that on my home directory ? (I know I can go from Arch to Arch base sys )
Ok, so when you reinstall Linux for whatever reason, how do you point the new install on drive 1 to the second drive 2 home directory so that you dont have to reinstall all your programs?
TTY is text-only terminal, basically a shell prompt without any graphical enviornment (so you don't need xorg). You can get to it by hitting CTRL + ALT + one of the function keys (Typically F3-F6). CTRL + ALT + F7 will return you to the graphical session. For sake of completeness, F1 is the GUI login screen. F2 is the GUI desktop. Why is this preferable in some circumstances? If you are doing something that might make your graphical environment crash, then just drop into one of the TTY's and do what you need to do. If you cause your DE to crash or xorg to die, it doesn't matter. TTY don't care!
Been thinking about testing this. I use a separate home partition (one hard drive in my computer), but I never tested installing Linux mounting an existing home partition. Should test it out.
Can I move /usr directory the same way? I m trying hard to find something instead everything is confusing and system is also crashing as I rsync -a usr? Can u suggest something
It would be a nice to have a tutorial in which you install a different distro keeping the same home or multiple distros with the same /home. (Ubuntu and Arco). Is not so scary as it seems and when a linux user start distro hopping is a useful knowledge.
Because rsync is a much more robust tool that can resume interrupted copy operations, and can be used to verify the copy after it completes. Also it works very efficiently over a network.
Hello man. I have two drives on my computer. I installed playonlinux on my Linux mint which is currently saved in my home directory as '''PlayonLinux virtual drives" folder on one of my drives where my OS is running. It really took a lot of space. How can I move this folder from my home directory where it is currently stored to the other drive on my computer and create a symbolic link so that my computer thinks it is still in its location. I really need this space and I would appreciate it if you make a video on this. Thanks man.
a little later this response, but hopefully helps another, what I did is that I did a partition of my hdd in almost the half of it for my windows, keeping it in ntfs (maybe I might changed since I read is not that good but will infor myself better about it) and then I did this in the video for the other half
hie... I am using CentOs 6.10... followed the steps to move home directory.. and i could do succesfully....but there is an issue... result for df -Th is given below... which is fine: Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda1 ext4 33G 4.3G 27G 14% / tmpfs tmpfs 763M 220K 763M 1% /dev/shm /dev/sda3 ext4 40G 29G 9.3G 76% /home but when I check on disk usage analyzer... the root is showing 100% filled... which means its eating up space for earlier /home... please help me out... PS: I am a newbie to linux...
I have a linux/windows dualboot, and I have all my personal files in a separate partition, but when I tried to setup spotify local files the media folder doesn't appear. The same happens with JDownloader if I want to download something automatically to that partition. (is this because linux can't use other partitions like windows does?) *INSERT SORRY FOR MY ENGLISH* xD
mmmh mounting somewhere like ~/ is actually not that dumb i always went with moving everything over and creating a symbolic link ... depending on how crazy you go with this you may encounter some trouble though. i have done such stuff for some logfile paths and when you detach the drive the system did not want to finish booting until the drive was present again. so know what your in for
I always split my root and home directories over two drives. Problem is, my root directory is on an SSD, and my /Home directory isn't. So it gets a little slower when i do that. But with the video editing and other data that i'm always moving around, it's a compromise that i need to take. As i'm saving read/writes against my SSD. Oh well.
Removing the home folder was not a good idea: you don't have a backup of your data in the home folder at least in the VM. It would have been better to have a well thought partitioning scheme before installing the system. Now if you didn't put your /home on a separate drive during the installation then it would be better to copy the data from the huge subfolders under /home/dt to that separate drive and create a symlink between these subfolders (for instance ln -s /mnt/tmp/Music /home/dt/Music). You still need to have a backup of these data. Look also at the comment of Myszka! Cheers
i did the root on one part and home on 2nd part. on a clean install of deb. worked fine. till i went to move some files to root.. guess what. NOPE.... sudo didnt work . had to su to root. but iam not 100 on term yet. so point and click in the file manger tryin to use right click menu copy n paste wasnt working as paste was greyed out... now i have to learn how to fix that and i dont even know where to start to look .
@@LloydLynx Simpler than I thought. And if I were to reinstall the system, should I simply indicate the flagged disk / as root, the next installation and should the system take the already flagged and existing disk as /Home without deleting anything inside?
@@LloydLynx Just commented on this here. As you seem to know the answer: Does it mean that if I mount my existing /home partition and do useradd -m during installation, it will map my existing partition to my new user account? Didn't really test that yet, that's why I ask.
@@digitaltorrent It won't auto mount that partition as /home, since the data telling it to is stored as part of the OS. When you set that partition as /home during fresh installation, be sure that it's *not* set to wipe it.
@@marioschroers7318 Yes, it will treat everything as if the system has a single drive. I haven't tried it myself, but I have no reason to believe it would recreate /home on the primary drive.
I know this is old video, dt.........The only thing missing is the procedure for actually doing a recovery if your boot drive fails. Secondly. your link for the blog post is not showing up because you restructured the site and instead of blog, the link is articles. You might want to edit these notes on the video. Just sayin...
Rather than removing everything under /home ("sudo rm -rf /home/*"), it is much safer to rename the home directory ("sudo mv /home /home~") and then create a separate empty home directory for the mount point ("sudo mkdir /home"). This way, all your data is still under /home~/username. After you've tested everything including automounting the new home directory on the second drive, then you can delete /home~ if you wish.
Jeffrey Merrick while doing this your tip helped me a lot. if i werent to do this i had lost my home folder lol. i renamed mine to homey xd
Well, I lost everything lmao.. should've checked the comments sooner
@@viego29 well, first thing before messing with your system is always BACKUP. cant go wrong with that.
Okay so following linear left towards right logic, you are saying:
type "sudo mv /home /home~" which will move /home to the NEW drive "/home~" then typing "sudo mkdir /home~" will make the new drive file the new directory.
Thanks for helping me wipe all my data 11:38
@6:49 - just in case anyone is wondering rsync -x option means 'don't cross filesystem boundaries', so if you happen to have a soft link (or hard link?) file that links to a file on another mount point do not copy those files (on that difference mount point)
I was just about to do this for myself then you post the video! What fortunate timing
OMG same!
For some years now it has been my practice to have the OS install in its own partition, even with only one drive. Allocate one partition of, say, 50GB for the OS, and a second one of the same size, initially left unused. All the rest is for /home. On today’s multi-terabyte drives, this is no big deal.
What’s the second OS-sized partition for, you may ask? That’s if you want to try out another distro without wiping out your original OS install. You can point its /home directory at the same one used by the first install, and have all your user files immediately available under the new OS without having to copy them back and forth.
I just want to echo what DT pointed out earlier: if it is the /home directory you're moving (or any other directory where config files are kept), it's a good idea to do the entire process in tty, because you can potentially break your system (nothing unfixable, but still, why worry about that). If it is only music or videos or things like that, then it's fine to do it in the GUI. If you don't already know how to edit a text file in tty, learn that first. You can use nano, vim, or even ed, the standard text editor (depending on whether you're a noob, pro, or hacker, respectively).
Also, if this is the first time you're doing this, have your /home directory backed up to an external drive, just in case you delete it before actually copying it. That would really be a shame :D
In fact, it's a good idea to have your /home directory backed up on an external (unplugged) drive anyway, just in case of a hardware failure or something like that. But that's just common sense.
followed instructions
went into TTY, rmed my /home/, had to add a -R as it was not empty :)
went to switch back to plasma session
made me log in
i'd log in and it'd blink and go right back to the login prompt
fortunately I remembered /etc/fstab - and it had a comment in it that reminded me the command to get the UUID.
Muddled my way through executing the command *from within nano* so I could mark, copy, paste with Nano's horrible default keybindings (I have no /home, so I have no .nanorc)
So just from my hairbrained memory, I was able to get my new /home/ filled in on the fstab file.
Rebooted and viola!
The login loop would've made me super nervous if it hadn't been a fresh install. Just wasn't patient enough to wait for the new drive to arrive before installing :)
Thanks, and as always, keep being awesome!
I would love to see a video of installing a new OS while keeping the /home directory.
thank you dt. I'm a noob and you made such a complex operation so easy to understand. i'll definitely support you on patreon once i'm employed.
hows the employment thing going
You don't understand how much this helped
Derek, thanks a lot for such an informative video! Logically, the next one should be about how to configure the fstab file, when different drives (SSD, HHD) are available... e.g. a SSD for the system, and a couple of HDDs for data storage... Once again, minor features and nuancies you describe so well matter!
I still can't believe a faster way hasn't been created yet. Try doing this to twenty+ separate machines. Even Win10 is better at this.
Wow, perfect execution of a tutorial video Derek!
@12:36 - output with less clutter (we don't really need to see cgroup on entries) is: df -lh
My old installation used to be symlinked together, I had manually symlinked about half the folders within /home to another drive. It was such a pain when they broke.
I've been doing that with a single link to a directory on my 2nd drive. The only annoyance is navigating to it when saving/opening files.
I currently have files spread across 3 drives on my main machine. I used to use symlinks to tie it altogether, but this got a little bit irritating when moving around the directory tree caused relative links to misbehave. So lately I have decided to try bind mounts instead.
I approve of more DT tutorials :D Nicely explained dude.
Thank you, Derek. ~ is bloat. Seriously, good and clear presentation.
@11:31 - fstab file the '0' is for 'used by dump tool, 0 meaning don’t dump if filesystem is not present.' and the '2' = used by fsck tool for discovering filesystem check order, this value means check this device after root filesystem.'. source: search online for 'How to Move Home Directory to New Partition or Disk in Linux' and check out the techmint article. UA-cam dosen't seem to like us posting links
Followed the steps, now nothing in my Linux is working, can't open anything, can't click on anything, brother wtf, everything was fine until the deleting process, followed the command, and boom
The instructions worked great. I got lazy, and stopped using the terminal over the last 20 years. Now, I regret it, and am getting back into it again. I'm Getting close to 82 now, so I can use that as an excuse. Back in 2003, I was running Gentoo and loved it, but I got lazy and am now using Pop os
I prefer using a dedicated partition/drive for data files, HOME is mostly for transitory and local packages files. HOME is usually a big source of issues between distros and BSD family!
Thanks - I screwed up my / and made it 10gb instead of 100gb originally, so i redid everything but figured i could be sneaky and keep my /home on the larger partition, but instead it created a new one on root (/). so i essentially wiped the old partition and followed this, along with Jeffrey's comment for safety on keeping /home~ in case of mistakes. nice.
** Thanks Derek!!, this makes switching from Arch back to Ubuntu so much easier! (lol) Gparted is ok, I like KDE Partition Manager better. Love your new pop filter, I was going to suggest the BSW, which is small and clean. You can put it a lot closer to the mic too.
As always: thanks for the great, informative, easy to follow content. :) But: WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I NEEDED TO DO THIS, MAN???? Haha I did this a while back, though
I would have preferred to learn how from you :)
Good vid. Isn't an inspection mount to /home (7:08) not needed? It was unmounted soon (8:16).
Instead, we could qc-inspect sd[a]1 contents back at /mnt/tmp/ (6:19), especially helped by powerful rsync -c checksum flag?
I was wondering if you could put /boot efi, /root on one disk (sda) ------- /home on other disk (sdb)…I won't be using a swap partition, I'll be making a swap file. This would be at install.
I will be using 2 NVMe drives. I used SATA drives in this example but it's still the same.
@DistorTube I would like to thank you for this information.... I would just like to bring it to your attention that the link to this blog article is broken.... I had no problem finding the information on your website but thought you might want to know.... Great information thanks.
Thanks dt! Worked smoothly. I just move my entire home directory to an HDD and expanded root to cover the entire SSD
Great video. Thank you for the explanation. I would like to just move my music/video/download folders only and not the whole home folder to my separate harddrive. How may I do this ?
Thanks DT, just what I was looking for!
Wow! I just did this same thing but just for my /Video folder. Two days ago.... I added a 1tb HDD to the system and it is mounted to my /home/Videos folder... It has the hold drive just for movies.... :-D
Now when I reinstall I'll just tell it NOT to format that drive on installation and use that drive for my /Videos folder...
Thanks DT
LLAP
Cool Stuff DT, I am on the way to my LPIC 1,2,3 Exam. Maybe in about 8 month I will finish this and can get a job in this area? Then, I will contribute to your account. I like your Stuff !!!
in my opinon man, I feel like there is a surge of new linux people trying to rice their WM/DE and what not. what do you think about doing in depth tutorials on config customization explaining why you do what you do in your dotfiles, and throwing them up on your main site maybe even monetize them behind patroen . just a suggestion, keep doing the good the work!
9:39 let me back into the Lock Screen but every time I enter my password the screen goes black and puts me back into the Lock Screen. I’ve tried rebooting through the tty but nothing happens. Please help.
awesome worked perfectly. and very useful thanks DT !
Didn't know that move is such a revelation. I'm using a separate drive for the homedir for years on my laptop. On my desktop the homedir sits on a separate partition, which I unmount when upgrading, etc.
i am gettin glogged out after the reboot ( after making all the changes )
tried 5-6 times watching the video and then ur written instructions on the blog also.
I've already got my home directory on another drive where I want it, so I'm here for the part where it's permanently mounted. Thank you!
Question: Are these instructions also for if your home directory is [to be] on the same disk but different partition?
this was tough to follow for a newbie like me, but i managed to follow along with a couple extra google look-ups on how to do this or that
11:20 - it doesn't matter how many spaces between the fields?
7:06 - /dev/sdb1 is already mounted in /mnt/tmp ( 6:17 ) and what you see in Nemo is different mount point: /media/$USER/$UUID (look in Nemo title bar...)
I was wondering the same
fair enough, but you can mount drives wherever you want infinitely many times too, so it doesn't really matter what was the mountpoint that nemo found when it's the same drive
what about backing up applications? would mounting /usr and /etc be enough? would that break something?
Thanks so much - Clear & Concise! Couldn't ask for a better tutorial.
id take ntfs for the seperate drive since then i can also use that same drive on a windows installation if i really want to (dual boot systems come to mind)
also it could be a good idea to move your syslogs and that kinda stuff somewhere seperate just so that if anything fails you can easily go through them and investigate
You could also just create a separate partition for /home
But I want to migrate the hole OS to another disk drive, how is that done?
I have been doing this on Windows too with each directory for downloads music documents etc. Even for my email profile. Never tried the home folder completely because I could never tell how much space I need and also so that reinstalling will delete all my configs to start fresh. I am diatrohopping with the same distro for a while now. Just moved to kubuntu and looks awesome.
I've only installed Linux on laptops with single drives so far, my main desktop is still windows. This will be very useful when I finally get around to going full Linux. Plus my main laptop can get a M.2 ssd put in it, which I plan on doing, making it a two hard drive machine.
Hi, Derek, thanks for your tutorials! I don't know if you know, but your blog appears to be down
I did not know I needed this up until I saw this. 🤟🤟
Could you not use a live cd with chroot if you really wanted to be safe
Thanks a lot for this simple and crisp tutorial
Hey DT! Great video. It looks like your blog link is broken. Do you have an updated location for this post?
Very useful. Thanks for posting
I am getting into using raspberry pis. If you boot from an SD card or flash drive, your boot drive will have very limited space.. Pi OSes also tend to assume they boot on a single drive system.
Mounting and additional flash drive can double your storage space. You can also clone that carefully crafted boot device or your data drive. Flash media, SD cards or flash drives have limited write cycle. I have lost data relying on an SD card without proper backups. It was my own writing,. I type very slowly, so that was days of work lost. Please be careful.
Could you do this similar thing by making a new partition on the same drive as the OS for your /home directory?
btw do you use middle click paste aka primary selection?
Most of the time I just use middle click for copy/paste. In alacritty, I also have Shift + CTRL + c/v to copy/paste.
@@DistroTube i mean that the shortcut in gnome terminal too but i generally find primary paste easier
If I move the home folder does it not move the music folder and all that to the second drive?
You explained it really well, thanks a lot!
Quick question: Where do you mount a second drive? /mnt/seconddrive, /media/seconddrive, /home/seconddrive,..?
It was a great video
The link to the blog post does not work
Can you specify all this when you partition the drive at install
I probably have a dumb question but I have not found the answer online. I have a ssd that 250gb and a hdd that is 20tb the ssd has / and my hdd has my /home on it. If I decided to change distros I'm on (Arch base sys) can I switch to a Debian or a Redhat base linux with out without messing up the app or data that on my home directory ? (I know I can go from Arch to Arch base sys )
Awesome! Thank you! 💯
Ok, so when you reinstall Linux for whatever reason, how do you point the new install on drive 1 to the second drive 2 home directory so that you dont have to reinstall all your programs?
So what is TTY, and why is it preferable?
TTY is text-only terminal, basically a shell prompt without any graphical enviornment (so you don't need xorg). You can get to it by hitting CTRL + ALT + one of the function keys (Typically F3-F6). CTRL + ALT + F7 will return you to the graphical session. For sake of completeness, F1 is the GUI login screen. F2 is the GUI desktop.
Why is this preferable in some circumstances? If you are doing something that might make your graphical environment crash, then just drop into one of the TTY's and do what you need to do. If you cause your DE to crash or xorg to die, it doesn't matter. TTY don't care!
Another mystery solved; thank you very much!
You're doing the lord's work. Thank you.
Would this process be the same on Mint Cinnamon 21.3 distro? Thanks!
I don't have second drive but want to install Debian with two partitions / and /home, but I don't know and I wonder, is 64GB enough for / partition?
Been thinking about testing this. I use a separate home partition (one hard drive in my computer), but I never tested installing Linux mounting an existing home partition. Should test it out.
What if I wanted to encrypt the separate drive?
Absolutely great!
Can I move /usr directory the same way? I m trying hard to find something instead everything is confusing and system is also crashing as I rsync -a usr? Can u suggest something
It would be a nice to have a tutorial in which you install a different distro keeping the same home or multiple distros with the same /home. (Ubuntu and Arco). Is not so scary as it seems and when a linux user start distro hopping is a useful knowledge.
Why not use the genfstab command instead of doing it manually?
Thank you. It worked 😊
Can you please explain why are you used rsync or not for example cp? Thanks.
Because rsync is a much more robust tool that can resume interrupted copy operations, and can be used to verify the copy after it completes. Also it works very efficiently over a network.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Thank you a lot.
Now how would I be able to use this home directory with another distro of Linux? Or maybe even wsl?
Hello man. I have two drives on my computer. I installed playonlinux on my Linux mint which is currently saved in my home directory as '''PlayonLinux virtual drives" folder on one of my drives where my OS is running. It really took a lot of space. How can I move this folder from my home directory where it is currently stored to the other drive on my computer and create a symbolic link so that my computer thinks it is still in its location. I really need this space and I would appreciate it if you make a video on this. Thanks man.
I dual boot on a ssd, I already use my hd for users Windows folder, ntfs, is it okay to also use it for Linux home folder?
a little later this response, but hopefully helps another, what I did is that I did a partition of my hdd in almost the half of it for my windows, keeping it in ntfs (maybe I might changed since I read is not that good but will infor myself better about it) and then I did this in the video for the other half
what is the difference between vi and vim???
this was so helpful. thank you.
hie... I am using CentOs 6.10... followed the steps to move home directory.. and i could do succesfully....but there is an issue...
result for df -Th is given below... which is fine:
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 ext4 33G 4.3G 27G 14% /
tmpfs tmpfs 763M 220K 763M 1% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3 ext4 40G 29G 9.3G 76% /home
but when I check on disk usage analyzer... the root is showing 100% filled... which means its eating up space for earlier /home...
please help me out...
PS: I am a newbie to linux...
LEGEND
I have a linux/windows dualboot, and I have all my personal files in a separate partition, but when I tried to setup spotify local files the media folder doesn't appear. The same happens with JDownloader if I want to download something automatically to that partition. (is this because linux can't use other partitions like windows does?) *INSERT SORRY FOR MY ENGLISH* xD
mmmh mounting somewhere like ~/ is actually not that dumb i always went with moving everything over and creating a symbolic link ... depending on how crazy you go with this you may encounter some trouble though. i have done such stuff for some logfile paths and when you detach the drive the system did not want to finish booting until the drive was present again. so know what your in for
I always split my root and home directories over two drives. Problem is, my root directory is on an SSD, and my /Home directory isn't. So it gets a little slower when i do that. But with the video editing and other data that i'm always moving around, it's a compromise that i need to take. As i'm saving read/writes against my SSD. Oh well.
Removing the home folder was not a good idea: you don't have a backup of your data in the home folder at least in the VM. It would have been better to have a well thought partitioning scheme before installing the system. Now if you didn't put your /home on a separate drive during the installation then it would be better to copy the data from the huge subfolders under /home/dt to that separate drive and create a symlink between these subfolders (for instance ln -s /mnt/tmp/Music /home/dt/Music).
You still need to have a backup of these data. Look also at the comment of Myszka!
Cheers
i did the root on one part and home on 2nd part. on a clean install of deb. worked fine. till i went to move some files to root.. guess what. NOPE.... sudo didnt work . had to su to root. but iam not 100 on term yet. so point and click in the file manger tryin to use right click menu copy n paste wasnt working as paste was greyed out... now i have to learn how to fix that and i dont even know where to start to look .
So does this work with partitions on one drive aswell?
Yes
by the way... there is no need for chmod? How did he get tty promt?
hit ctrl+alt+f3 on the login screen
how do i get into a tty prompt?
I thought I had moved my /home to a second partition, but I later found out that I hadn't. I'm trying to correct that now.
What if your home directory is encrypted?
Can you add this to the Arch wiki? That would be awesome.
This stuff is included in the installation guide for quite a while
How do you create the /Home folder to a second drive in a new installation?
Create a partition on the second drive and set the mount point to "/home".
@@LloydLynx Simpler than I thought. And if I were to reinstall the system, should I simply indicate the flagged disk / as root, the next installation and should the system take the already flagged and existing disk as /Home without deleting anything inside?
@@LloydLynx Just commented on this here. As you seem to know the answer: Does it mean that if I mount my existing /home partition and do useradd -m during installation, it will map my existing partition to my new user account?
Didn't really test that yet, that's why I ask.
@@digitaltorrent It won't auto mount that partition as /home, since the data telling it to is stored as part of the OS. When you set that partition as /home during fresh installation, be sure that it's *not* set to wipe it.
@@marioschroers7318 Yes, it will treat everything as if the system has a single drive. I haven't tried it myself, but I have no reason to believe it would recreate /home on the primary drive.
I have a 64Gb SSD for root and a 250Gb SSD for home and a 4To SSHD for stock and have had that setup for years..!!
That is a lot of GiB dedicated to /
@@_DT_ When I bought the drive, there was only a $3 difference between a 32Gb and a 64Gb, so I got the 64Gb..
Can you still do this if you only have one physical drive?
If you set up a partition in it first yeah.
I know this is old video, dt.........The only thing missing is the procedure for actually doing a recovery if your boot drive fails. Secondly. your link for the blog post is not showing up because you restructured the site and instead of blog, the link is articles. You might want to edit these notes on the video. Just sayin...
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How to reinstall linux without overwriting the separate home directory?