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December 24, 2005
/home at home
When I bought a new disk for the PC at home, I partitioned it right away and put the new Ubuntu on half of the new disk, leaving the old Ubuntu on the other disk. Then instead of using the existing /home, I started a new one on the new partition, leaving myself 40 GB for "files" on a second partition of the new disk.
It later occurred to me that I've been taking the wrong approach for years. $HOME never really changes. You carry it with you. Systems come and go every six months or so. Ideally I'd try out a new system probably every three months, maybe more often. The ones I want to try out on this PC, but haven't because I made such a hash of partitioning, include OpenSolaris -- Have we incorporated enough of the GNU stack yet? -- Gentoo, FreeBSD, a recent Fedora, maybe something exotic. Yet our $HOME files need to be in no danger just because I want to try out a new OS.
Backup would be simplified radically as well. I used to back up software that came from someone else. Only recently have I realized that unless you're the one making the software, you should not bother backing it up. Save your software. Save your config. Save your content. The rest you can download from somewhere. If you cannot download the software from somewhere and yet you rely on it, are you sure you're doing the right thing?
Posted by Mark at December 24, 2005 08:34 AM
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