The Advantages of This Guide

This guide was written simply because there were flaws in the other guides and it was worth recording these notes for future reference. Community Documentation is an excellent way to help others at the same time. This guide:

• Partitions and sets-up fstab first
  • There are guides that use mount commands to do the initial partition mounting, and then set-up fstab after you have moved your /home. If you mess up your fstab, then when you reboot, your system will lose track of your /home files. Setting up fstab first and using sudo mount -a to mount the partitions avoids this problem.
• Use rsync to move the files

  • There is lot's of debate about which command to copy your files to the new /home partition. This debate stems from a time in the past when cp was not able to do it properly (I think it skipped files?). Cp was not designed to be a powerful backup tool. The fix, then, was to use a combination of find and cpio (See section 8.3.5). Cp has had improvements since, but rsync is designed for backups of /home, and much more. Rsync is able to maintain other characteristics of the file, like permissions, ownership, and timestamps.

The Guide

Setting up /home on a separate partition is beneficial because your settings, files, and desktop will be maintained if you upgrade, (re)install Ubuntu or another distro. This works because /home has a sub-folder for each user's settings and files which contain all the data & settings of that user. Also, fresh installs for linux typically like to wipe whatever partition they are being installed to so either the data & settings need to be backed-up elsewhere or else avoid the fuss each time by having /home on a different partition.

Setup Partitions

This is beyond the scope of this page. Try here if you need help. Memorize or write down the location of the partition, something like /sda3. Its been suggested to use either ext2, ext3 or ext4 rather than vfat or ntfs. Using vfat is not supported and may fail, since vfat does not support permissions. Ntfs has an advantage of being journalised, like ext3 & ext4 but it can also be read easily by Windows. It is a lot less stable than ext3 or ext4 so it is really a question of stability compared with easy access for Windows. If you don't dual-boot with Windows or have plenty of hard-drive space then staying with very much safer ext3 or 4 is the obvious choice.

Find the uuid of the Partition

The uuid reference to all partitions get to a command-line to try this

sudo blkid

Now you just need to note down (copy&paste into a text-file) the uuid of the partition that you have set-up ready to be the new /home partition. Some older releases of Ubuntu might not have the "blkid" command so this could be used instead

sudo vol_id -u <partition>

for example

sudo vol_id -u /dev/sda3

Setup Fstab

These commands should; 1. Create a backup of fstab. Replace "DateToday" with today's date so you can find the right back-up easily if you do need to use it later. 2. Open the standard text-editor to edit fstab. Note that Kubuntu uses "kate" & Xubuntu uses "mousepad" instead of "gedit" you could use a different text-editor if you prefer.

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.DateToday
gksu gedit /etc/fstab

and add these lines into it

# (identifier)  (location, eg sda5)   (format, eg ext3 or ext4)      (some settings) 
UUID=????????   /media/home    ext3          nodev,nosuid       0       2 

Replace???????? with the UUID number of the intended /home partition.

The Fstab location should be a temporary one - we are to mount the temporary location and copy the existing home to it. (/media/home is assumed in the rest of the guide). If /media/home does not exist yet, then you should create it with the command:

sudo mkdir /media/home

Now, mount the partition with:

sudo mount -a

Check that you can copy files over, at least as root (ie with sudo).

Copy /home to the New Partition

sudo rsync -axS --exclude='/*/.gvfs' /home/. /media/home/.

The --exclude='/*/.gvfs' prevents rsync from complaining about not being able to copy .gvfs, but I believe it optional. Even if rsync complains, it will copy everything else anyway. (See here for discussion on this)

Make the Switch

Here is the point of no return. If the previous two steps worked, you should have no troubles. The data in /home now exists in 2 places and we need fstab to point to the new one. so again on a command-line

gksu gedit /etc/fstab

and now edit the lines you added earlier to delete the /media part. This should make /media/home into /home as follows

# (identifier)  (location, eg sda5)   (format, eg ext3 or ext4)      (some settings) 
UUID=????????   /home    ext3          nodev,nosuid       0       2

Rename your /home directory:

sudo mv /home /old_home

Re-create a /home directory with (this is because the next steps need the location to already exist):

sudo mkdir /home

It seems that this guide fails at this point (under 9.04) because sudo fails as it can not find the config files it needs to check the users sudo permissions. This is because /home no longer exists. To fix this I needed to start a shell as root (su command and supply the root password) and create the new /home. - Roger Morton

Edit fstab so that your new home partition actually points to /home (ie. by changing /media/home to /home)

gksudo would not launch gedit (for the same reason sudo failed above I suspect) so I was forced to use vi to edit my fstab. And I hate vi. - Roger Morton

and finally, remount the partition with:

sudo mount -a

I recall that this failed too. I think because home is already mounted - even though we have renamed it. umount /home failed because /home was in use by the GUI. In the end I had to reboot and bring up the recovery console as root and fix the mess. So bottom line - I don't think this is such a good guide. Needs further work and testing. - Roger Morton

Reboot to ensure that currently running programs use the new /home

After a reboot

If everything is working, great, you can delete /old_home. If things aren't working, you can undo by moving your /old_home back to /home, and delete the line you added to fstab.

Technical Notes and Resources

Rsync was chosen over cp and find|cpio because it seemed to maintain permissions.

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/01/29/move-home-to-its-own-partition/

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=46866