5

I am making a 10G partition "/" (root) partition that will contain my Ubuntu OS and the rest of the drive will be the "/home" with the music, home, download, etc...folders. (that come originally.....)

Do those general folders go directly on the /home partition?

I mean if I make a / and a /home partition....that means that one day when I wanna reinstall Ubuntu, I'll just need to do it on the / partition and all the data that is on /home (in the download, home, music...etc folders) will stay there after the installation. Am I right?

Elysium
  • 11,012
  • 2
    Try this http://askubuntu.com/questions/142695/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-having-a-separate-home-partition . To Mods , also a Similar question. – atenz Jul 12 '12 at 18:44

1 Answers1

8

Root (/) is the root of the entire filesystem to which other directories can be mounted in various branches of the filesystem. One of these branches is /home/, and in this directory, individual users have a "home directory" using their username. In your home directory are all your personal directories such as music, documents, etc.

In theory, you can keep your home directory, but a lot of preferences, etc, are stored there, and will remain even if not used. When you install a new version, you would specify your /home partition to be mounted in the new installation and it will use it just as if it were not separate.

Marty Fried
  • 18,466
  • 1
    Thanks for the info. You are saying that it is much better to have the /home partition formated and clean then? – Elysium Jul 12 '12 at 19:16
  • 1
    No, I don't know which is better, really; I think it depends on the individual. There can be tradeoffs either way, and I've seen very knowledgeable people recommend for and against separate partitions. I personally have a separate partition that contains pictures, documents, music, etc, and I mount this partition for every installation (I often have several). I then just create symbolic links to various directories of this in my home directory. For example /home/documents is a link to /mnt/shared/documents. – Marty Fried Jul 12 '12 at 20:11