Advantage of a separate /home partition?

[Jack Jackson]

alex wrote:
> I recently asked about the advantage of having /home on a separate
> partition and was told that in the event ubuntu had to be reinstalled
> for whatever reason, you wouldn't lose the data you had accumulated
> in /home.
> 
> Then, while I was installing ubuntu, I noticed that you can create
> a /home partition as part of the installation.  This brings up a 
> question -----
> 
> If you previously had a /home partition and needed to do a ubuntu
> reinstall, how do you prevent losing the original /home partition data
> during the reinstall process?  


I'm fairly sure that in the manual partition process it recognizes a 
home directory and does NOT destroy data on it if data exists. I have 
done this many times- reinstalled ubuntu (and Suse, and Fedora and 
debian) with an existing /home partition and the install has never 
overwritten data on my existing /home partition.

(Your actual mileage may vary, proceed at own risk, backup all files 
before continuing, you may not have to speak with an operator, your call 
is important to us, etc etc)

1. SEE CAVEATS
2. choose manual partition
3. Put root at / and home to /home
4. be sure it recognizes the filesystem on the /home directory as what 
it currently is set to, and says clearly "/home"
5. Hit "go" and pray (it's almost certain NOT to reformat your existing 
/home).

It's never failed me yet and I do this a lot!

> 
> It seems to me that you still have to include the old /home partition 
> in the reinstallation but if you did, it would be formatted and you'd
> lose the old data.  
> 
> If you didn't include it in the reinstallation, you'd end up with a new
> 'home' directory in the system root and you wouldn't have access to the
> old /home partition.
> 
> What am I missing?  Is there some way to include the old /home partition
> in the reinstall without reformatting it?
> 
> alex, the OF
> 
> 
>