Heya folks, some people online told me I was doing partitions wrong, but I’ve been doing it this way for years. Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.

I have separate partitions for EFI, /, swap, and /home. Am I doing it wrong? Here’s how my partition table looks like:

  • FAT32: EFI
  • BTRFS: /
  • Swap: Swap
  • Ext4: /home

I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups. Someone told me there’s no reason to use multiple partitions, but several times I have needed to reinstall the OS (Linux Mint) while preserving /home so this advice makes zero sense for me. But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way. I’d like to read what you say about this though.

  • Mambabasa@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    I use btrfs for my / because I can use Linux Mint’s Timeshift tool to make snapshots, but I don’t want snapshots of /home to be included. Am I doing this wrong?

    • S410@kbin.social
      7·
      1 year ago

      You can put your /home on a different BTRFS subvolume and exclude it from being snapshotted.

      • Mambabasa@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        How about when I reinstall the OS? Will it only affect the / and not touch the /home?

        • S410@kbin.social
          4·
          1 year ago

          As long as you don’t re-format the partition. Not all installers are created equal, so it might be more complicated to re-install the OS without wiping the partition entirely. Or it might be just fine. I don’t really install linux often enough to know that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • Infernal_pizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Not sure if that’s wrong or not tbh, I use snapper instead of timeshift and I wanted /home included in the snapshots anyway (I think it let me set them up as 2 separate jobs). The reason I went with subvolumes instead of separate partitions is that I didn’t have to worry about sizing. I also know I can reinstall to my root subvolume without affecting the others, depending on the installer for your distro I don’t know how easy that is vs just having separate partitions. I played around with it in a VM for a while to see what the backup and restore process is like before I actually committed to anything!

      • Mambabasa@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Alright, thanks, I’ll try some experiments the next time I have the opportunity to do so.