Moving home to new drive subdirectory, I have some questions

[Aragorn]

@teraskasi

Hello. I know it’s pretty straight forward to mount an entire partition to /home, but I didn’t really find any examples online of people mounting a subdirectory to /home. So I wanted to double check here to make sure I’m doing it correctly before I reboot my system and end up with an unbootable system.

The first question that springs to mind is “Why do you want to do this?”

1. There is no sane rationale behind moving the home directories outside of /home in the root directory, and /mnt is intended as a temporary mountpoint only.

2. The change will probably be undone again when the filesystem package is updated. This package ensures that the filesystem hierarchy is sane and compliant with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

@teraskasi

Run: cp -rp /home /mnt

That should be…

cp -RPp

You’d want to preserve permissions and file ownership.

@teraskasi

Can I move /home while logged in? Or do I need to use a live disc?

You can do it from runlevel 1, logged in as root. It would not be a good idea to do it from the normal mode of operation. Doing it via a live USB/CD/DVD is probably the better/easier way.

I’ve written a tutorial on how to split off a directory onto another volume, with /home as an example, but it does not cover a modification of the directory hierarchy.

[Tip] Root filesystem nearly full but got a spare partition sitting around? Split off some stuff!

Difficulty: ★★★☆☆ Introduction As you should all already know by now, GNU/Linux is a FLOSS variant of the UNIX operating system design, and UNIX does not know the concept of drive letters, nor does it approach storage from the vantage of having different volumes. Instead, everything is mounted into a uniform directory hierarchy, so that regardless of what physical medium any particular group of files resides on ─ even if this physical medium is actually located in another computer across the …