Hey folks!
I’m about to distro hop (again) to test Tumbleweed for a longer period of time 🦎 However, something i’ve not done before is to have my /home directory on a separate partition, should I? If I do it, should it be a different filesystem than the rest? (Been reading on OpenSuse TW forums and seen people mentioning that they use BTRFS for /home and XFS for the rest, or the other way around. Are there any benefits of using separate filesystems, or is this done to get the BTRFS backup for the /home dir?
What are the pros and cons of doing these changes to my system, lemmy know :)
Separate partition or btrfs subvolume is my preference, that way I can take homedir snapshots on a schedule (every hour or two) separate from my rootfs snapshot schedule.
This.
I use single partitions, because since everything is SSD now, partition failures are almost nonexistent. I don’t know why; I don’t understand the mechanics of why disks are more prone to partition failures, but now when SSD start to fail, it seems as if it is anything except something that can be isolated by position.
But I do isolate by subvolume, and for the reason you give: snapshots. I snapshot root only when something changes, but do hourly snapshots of home. It keeps data use more manageable. Nightly backups, and I never have more than 24 home snapshot at a time.
Write yourself some package manager hook scripts that fire off root snapshots before package upgrades or installation. I keep like 10 of those in addition to my scheduled system snapshots. It makes rolling back a borked update trivial in case I don’t have time to fix something that went wrong before important work needs to happen.
snapper does that; I think it’s available for most distros, so no scripting necessary. There’s an Arch package that takes snapshots before installing any software.
Neat stuff!