Re: [LUG] Separate Home Partition

The separate /home partition thing really comes down to a matter of
choice I think - in my experience the majority of skilled linux users
swear by having a separate /home (although nearly always on the same
disk as /, which to me seems a bit silly and self-defeating - it's like
keeping your backups on the same system as you're backing up).
Personally I don't bother unless there is a specific usage case for it,
which in my case, is following documented partitioning practices for
certain usually highly secured systems. None of my personal machines
have ever had a separate /home unless it's being NFS mounted or something.

Totally agree. I've never understood this fascination with some linux users to create unnecessary and artificial limits such as this. Maybe once when HDD's were tiny and expensive and striped RAID was immature. I think the real reason is that some people like to make problems so they have the satisfaction of resolving them later.

That said, sometimes a root drive gets a little full and the easiest solution is to move /home to a new drive. I've had to do that a number of times as systems and users grow.

And it really is easy. For benefit of others, it goes something like this;

Check your automated backup systems are fresh and operating normally.

Boot single user (you can do it multi as root (which has its own home dir in /root) if you're sure nobody else is going to have open files in /home or if you enjoy an element of unpredictability. Not if you su'd to root from a user though, as you'll still have open files under that user.)

Mount new partition as something like /home2

mv /home/* /home2

Cup of tea and a biscuit.

rmdir /home

umount /home2

Edit /etc/fstab to mount new drive as /home

mount /home to check that it's going to mount when you next reboot.