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 Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.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 But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way.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.
I use btrfs for my
/because I can use Linux Mint’s Timeshift tool to make snapshots, but I don’t want snapshots of/hometo be included. Am I doing this wrong?You can put your /home on a different BTRFS subvolume and exclude it from being snapshotted.
How about when I reinstall the OS? Will it only affect the
/and not touch the/home?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)_/¯
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!
Alright, thanks, I’ll try some experiments the next time I have the opportunity to do so.