Are there any good guides/sources on how to do this? I have an rsync cronjob set up with anacron to back up anything important that I come up with to an external drive. This, however does not allow me to e.g. keep my user settings in the DE; in addition, there’s always something I forget to back up or something that f@#!$ up and doesn’t work after doing so (e.g. last time a gpg key didn’t want to work ). It’d be nice to be able to upgrade each point release and keep everything in its perfect order and just resume working again.
I don’t know if this is even possible, since, from what I gather, depending on the software and changes in the releases there’s always a possibility that things might break but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Hello @telometto ,
There are the Instruction on Manual Partitioning here. I have done this and still do have a separate /home subvolume on my system. In fact my layout is as follows : /dev/sda + /dev/sdb set up as RAID 1 array and subvolume mounted as ‘/’ each are 240GB SSD. Then /dev/sdc partitioned as /boot-efi + boot ext4, then two subvolumes one mounted at /var and one mounted at /home. The ability to snapshot my /home subvolume is cool and way faster than rsync. Manual re-installation requires using the advanced blivet gui of the Anaconda installer to be able to do this.
If you have one drive, the BTRFS filesystem still has you covered since you can still divide the subvolume layout to your needs with the specific mount points you desire.
I have /home on a raid 5 array (LVM with ext4) and have had it that way since about fedora 21. Have never had a hitch in upgrades or new installs since that file system never gets reformatted and every bit of my data has been stable and secure. Yes, I keep a backup. Have never needed it.
Thanks you for the input and pointing me to the resource, Steven. I will try to manually partition the drive on a spare laptop I have laying around and install F34 on one of the partitions and then I will try to do a fresh install to F35 to see if I can get it working.
I only have a single drive, so no fancy setup for me I guess RAID arrays sure do seem cool, though. How has it been upgrading to (much) later versions of Fedora? Don’t some of the programs need to be reconfigured?
Absolutely not.
The raid array is managed by mdadm and /home does not contain binaries for most programs. It may contain some flatpak binaries and steam games but not normally used system software. Since it is more than 99% data and not OS binaries the upgrades and reinstalls do not touch /home.
You do have to keep in mind that some configuration files and such are in the /home as hidden folders (Ctrl+H). So keep in mind that it won’t be Clean installation unless you delete them. But it is also a benefit if you are clean installing just to fix some bugs and revert back to how it was previously ( installing same apps and such ) then it’s can save a lot of time.
). It’d be nice to be able to upgrade each point release and keep everything in its perfect order and just resume working again.
RAID arrays sure do seem cool, though. How has it been upgrading to (much) later versions of Fedora? Don’t some of the programs need to be reconfigured?