IMHO main purpose of `/home` is to carry the hidden folders for config information linked to the user. It is best used just for exact this purpose. If personal user data, such as documents, photos, whatsoever come into the game, it is much better and easier to have a separate partition for this single purpose and just to create a link to this partition in the `/home` folder.
Could you elaborate on this a bit more for a new user? What hidden configs are you saying belong in /home? And if I’m making a /data partition, where all the docs and pics etc go, how large would you suggest /home needs to be? I went with a /128gb root partition on the basis that I had a 1TB drive and would not want to run out of space what with logs and applications.
Well, that’s a good attitude at least. I’ve paid my “learning fees” myself over the decades in lost data and one Ethernet card. Learning is the reason I get all giddy in addition to being anxious when things start to go wrong.
My wife has finally started to accept the need for backups after 4 bricked laptops in 20 years.
Best of luck. I hope you get at least something back.
df -h
shows you how much of the available space is occupied
15 GB for / should be plenty - or give it double that
… more if you use and store VM’s in their default location
The rest can be your data partition - or /home if you want to put your data there
(which is what I do)
The hidden files and directories are those whose name begins with a dot
and they do not take up much space - except perhaps the directory your mail is stored in ~/.thunderbird in my case - it has grown over the years to be around 4 GB
If you use for example Dolphin as file manager you can customize it to have a “hidden files” button (that’s how I did it). Then just look into it on /home/{your user}. I have 13 hidden folders (e.g. .cache, .config, .local, …) and 10 hidden files (e.g. .bash_history, .bashrc, …)
/home does not be large if you use it mostly for your system. My / + /home together take only ~15 GiB, if you consider 32 GiB for both together you normally should be fine. My /home alone is less than 2 GiB.
I don’t know your use case, so finally you need to make your own educated decision on required sizes.
For a Data partition you could create a “Data” folder under /home/{your user}, link it to the formatted data partition’s file system, take over ownership, create an /etc/fstab entry for the Data partition. If it’s formatted as ext4 then e.g.
Just to close the loop on this. I used ddrescue to make a full copy of the damaged partition. I then ran testdisk, but that got me no joy. Following that, I ran photorec and… that seems to have recover 9432 files!
They are all unsorted, directory structure and most filenames were not preserved, but I still think that is a great result. Backing this up to my external hard drive, and going to reinstall manjaro on a different drive to see if that gets me more stable results. Thanks all for your comments and support.
