I would like to see a simplified way to mount ‘home’ onto either a separate partition or onto a second drive. This is a very basic need that is offered on other distributions.
You’d have to create a separate partition for $HOME at the time of installation - on whatever drive you choose it to be on.
Maybe you should re-read your question and re-ask it.
What do others provide that (you apparently think) isn’t available here?
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Hello @davidvj 
Questions:
- By thinking “simplified”, you mean a user friendly way or a bare simple method?
- Do you want to mount an existing home folder to a partition (/home → /partition/home) or mount an home folder to the root folder (/partition → /home)?
- How does other distros offer something like that? I see no difference between them. All work the same way.
As I remember, using openSuse, I was able to simply specify a partition/drive where I wanted to place home.
I suspect that this is quite a common need and if there is no obvious way provided then some sort of simple guidance would be helpful.
@davidvj It might sound really arrogant, but there thousands of articles on the internet which deal with this topic:
https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=linux%20move%20%2Fhome%20to%20another%20drive
Maybe you can try to ask at which position you don’t know what to do… I and the most of us, will not repeat and write “yet another tutorial how to move a /home folder”. An no, as i know there is not a “click and forget button” to do so, or maybe I never heard of it…
Doesn’t matter which Distribution, this works everywhere the same way.
So if you have question about the process, no problem, people will answer your questions for clarification, but writing another tutorial… oh man sorry, then i am out here.
Are you talking about the installation procedure, the way the installer guides you through the process?
It’s not at all obvious what it is that you complain about.
Yes, there are many tutorial regarding the move of home to another location … in my view this is a tedious operation and would be totally unnecessary if the installer provided this as an option during the basic install.
The reason that there are so many ‘relocate’ tutorials is that this is a common requirement for users which could be easily be part of the install procedure.
At installation time, this is not difficult to do.
You simply create the $HOME partition wherever you want it to be,
make a filesystem on it
and copy the entire contents of the previous $HOME partition to there
and then declare that partition to be the $HOME partition for this new install.
If you want to move the $HOME in an already existing system,
you do the exact same thing.
All that you then have to do in addition is to adjust the /etc/fstab file to point to that new location.
That simple process is really all that those tutorials describe.
You move the files and tell the system where they now are to be found …
You say openSuse provides a GUI way to do this?
During install?
I shall check that.
haven’t seen or used Suse for decades
The best compromise between space and fast system is to mount personal folders (Desktop, documents, photos, media etc) to another location.
This is simple and available by typing ‘locations’ in the menu. It can’t be simpler.
Your /home directory has .cache, .local, .config folders which are best kept (IMO) on the root drive.
Then it also has more personal folders (like /Downloads) which you can set to any location (/mnt/SSD/Downloads works well).
Then for ‘media’ storage, HDD is good, so we do /mnt/T4/Video.
Again, nothing simpler than specifying a new path for specific locations. It wouldn’t be worth adding further levels of complexity trying to simplify something that is already pretty simple.
You specify the location of /home when you install - you don’t get options in OpenSuse to move it later.
For me, if I wanted to buy a 512 SSD and use my 256 for system, then specifically /home on the 512, then I would just reinstall after doing a full timeshift backup… I guess it might be an issue if I’d gone crazy installing stuff on STEAM.
If you have specific issues, then you must post specific details and reasons - otherwise it’s more of a pointless rant IMO.
Sorry.
Oh wait… you need to relocate during the installation? Nothing is easier than that xD Just add a partition and type /home there as mountpoint, et voila! xD and you can do this with every folder you need to…
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It does, but you need to do manual partitioning instead of automatic ‘Erase Disk’ method.
For what it’s worth, today I migrated my current home directory into another partition in another drive. I have two ssds, I have windows installed on the larger one and manjaro on the tiny one. Since I am using manjaro more and more, I created a partition in the windows ssd and moved my home directory to that drive. I thought I would break my manjaro installation since I am a noob in Linux but I just followed along this article and everything is working fine till now.