Ubuntu

installing ubuntu preserving /home

Asked by anonym

Is it possible to preserve a /home partition when installing, and also when reinstalling ubuntu?
Or does one need to archive a a copy of /home somewhere else?

If there are instructions somewhere I will greatly appreciate to be told of the URI(s).

I am insterested in installing ubuntu on several computers, one of them currently running debian.

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Second related question:

Suppose that one installs ubuntu with a /home directory which had been used under debian.
Are there any preferences known to cause conflicts and which need to be deleted?

I do suspect the reinstallation allows to preserve home, but I am afraid of being confused with
the debian installation, (I remember ubuntu's default allowed fewer partitions) and my worst
nightmare is reformatting a partition while exploring the installation menus. I have valuable
files with scattered back ups. So I would like to know exactly what to do or at least be reassured
by somebody who has done this before.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Susana

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Simos Xenitellis  (simosx) said : 		#1

The most comfortable way to preserve /home, is to keep it on a separate partition.
In this way, when you reinstall, you specify that /home is on that specific partition, and the installation will reuse your files.

There should not be any conflicts between ubuntu and debian; the settings that are saved in the home directories are settings that go down to individual applications.

In case you do not have a partition available for /home, you can backup the content (tar cvfj homebackup.tar.bz2 /home), create the partition and extract the files. Then you can setup in /etc/fstab and the link is made. The UID/GID should be matched correctly.

Both Ubuntu and Debian (and more distros) offer the option by default for separate partitions for many of the root directories (/usr, /home, /tmp), and so on.

Normally a rather full installation of Ubuntu should be about 5GB, so you can make the root partition about 10GB (Linux avoids fragmentation with a special technique that requires a bit of free space available all time). Then give lots of space for /home.

Hope this helps.

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