Creating a seperate disk partion on my hardrive to save the HOME directory

Ask Fedora
1

Hello world,

I have recently reinstalled fedora 35 on my ssd card. Now I want my home directory on my hard drive. Can someone please explain to me the process of ensuring my partitions are correctly managed.

Thank you,
Luca

2 
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda                                                                         
├─sda1
│    vfat   FAT32       19EF-0FF3                                           
├─sda2
│    ext4   1.0         23817458-02d5-431e-917f-35a634c5cebe  626.8M    29% /run/media/jupiterbig34/23817458-02d5-431e-917f-35a634c5cebe
└─sda3
     crypto 2           27de3272-85f7-4990-b8c2-1c05b4af400b                
  └─luks-27de3272-85f7-4990-b8c2-1c05b4af400b
     btrfs        fedora_localhost-live
                        897ec513-5307-4341-9123-180e34b6bc33                
zram0
                                                                            [SWAP]
nvme0n1
│                                                                           
├─nvme0n1p1
│    vfat   FAT32       9CB7-6AE6                               585M     2% /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2
│    ext4   1.0         585dc642-d508-4d42-992a-0ff8c66d41ea  742.5M    17% /boot
└─nvme0n1p3
     crypto 2           22ba0585-a983-4a2b-bade-c5d13dde8c65                
  └─luks-22ba0585-a983-4a2b-bade-c5d13dde8c65
     btrfs        fedora_localhost-live
                        1df0de0c-0401-4689-9d8a-fceb7b6e78d9  231.8G     2% /home
                                                                            /

I need to move my /home to my hard drive. And potentially clear my hard drive from my old system where fedora was originally installed.

3

Think twice about this. How big is your SSD disk?
I noticed that some applications (e.g. Geary mail reader) are way slower on my desktop computer where Fedora is installed on the SSD but the home is mounted on the old hard drive. In fact I’m considering the idea of mounting the home in the SSD and use the hard drive only for large files and backup.

Geary is really slower in my desktop PC compared to my laptop where I have only one SSD disk. I guess it’s because all files Geary works with (sqlite database and cache files) are on the slow hard drive.
Probably other applications may have the same problem.

I’m curious to know other people’s opinions and experiences on this matter.

2 Likes
4

A general guideline in the interest of overall performance is that system files and files that are frequently accessed should be on the faster devices (SSD or NVME) and files that are seldom accessed should be on the slower HDD devices.

How that is achieved and what is acceptable to the user is an individuals choice.

1 Like
5

Hello @computersavvy me again! How are you master?

Jeff, how is the scheme of having the system in one partition (SSD) and the data in another one (HD) all this applied with Fedora.

Actually I have dual boot (F35, Win10) in my SSD. For example:

My scheme in Win10 is the system inside my SSD and ONLY my data (Documents, Pictures, Music, etc…) in my HD, so when I need re-install from scratch Win10 all I have to do after that is move the location of the folders (Documents, Pictures, etc) to my HD and that’s it.

I just installed again F35 and thanks to the fact that I have a external HD I make a backup of my data and left my laptop HD clean.

Now, I divided 2 partition my HD to have my data (Documents, pictures etc) from Win10 and F35 separate. In the new instalation of F35 I put the /home directory in my Fedora data HD partition, is this the most effcient and correct way?

And I already move all my data back to my /home HD partition… So far everything is fine.

Questions:

  1. When I need re-install F35 from scratch for any reason, how is it the procedure? I assume it is to install by default ( / and /home ) on SSD and then move the /home location to my HD partition and do a restorecon -R /home I guess?

  2. The fact that many configuration files are installed in /home makes a lot of noise, what happens here? how do you do with all this?

I Thank you in advance for any guidance.

EDIT:
PD: I’m experiencing very strange lagging behaviors, especially in firefox, I don’t like at all that there are files used by the system in my /home HD partition. I just want to specifically point Documents, Pictures, Music to my HD partition. I think that having the entire /home module on my HD is not very efficient to say!