Are there any disavantages of not having a separate home partition?

[Viva]

I've always installed ubuntu with a separate home partition, but I installed without one on my laptop. Are there any serious disadvantages of this? Upgrading is not a problem for me since I back up and reinstall everything or upgrade it directly in ubuntu.

[TeoBigusGeekus]

Not really - you just copy your home folder somewhere before you upgrade/reinstall and you're perfectly ok.

[Rex Bouwense]

None that I have run into since I have all of my data and pictures backed up with flash drives. It has been said that if you have a separate home and do a lot of tweaking to your computer and happen to break something serious, you can do a fresh re-install without having to screw with your data. I'm sure someone on these forums will come up with a serious disadvantage.

[dFlyer]

None that I know of, either way is fine, just keep a current backup of your home folder regardless if it's separate or not.

[Frogs Hair]

I use Ubuntu One for storing home folder items at installation time . I just login to Ubuntu One and copy my folders to the new installation .

If something were to go wrong those folders can be retrieved . File Sync keeps the folders updated when new items are added .

[Viva]

Does having a separate home partition make ubuntu faster? What about security?

[vanadium]

It won't make the system (noticeably) faster or slower.

In terms of security: if the data partition breaks, the system partition is not and vice versa. With one single partition, it is all or nothing.

This consideration would be important for a large server system. It is of practically no importance for a desktop system, though.

On a small drive, I would favour a single partition install in order to use space most efficiently, and for not having to decide on beforehand how much space to allocate for system and how much for user data.

On a larger drive, I like the convenience of a separate home. On a fresh install, this allows you to keep your user data in place, avoiding the need to re-copy your data (I am renaming my old home, and after installation, move the user data - not the settings - from my old home to the new one).

Single most important thing, though: have a (very) good backup of your user data on a separate medium. Operating systems change every six months and are downloaded for free. Your personal data, once lost, is lost for ever. All else hardly matters.

[oldfred]

While I often recommend a separate /home to new users to make a clean reinstall easier, I do not have separate /home but separate data partitions. My /home folder is only about 1GB and most of that is .wine with Picasa. So I can easily backup /home.

But this works for me on my desktop with multiple drives and multiple installs of Ubuntu. I can share data easily but you cannot share /home.

[jerrrys]

I have multiple drives and multiple installs and do the same as oldfred.

I also like to play and tweak and found Virtualbox good for this, may work for you

[mannequin]

I think that a separate /home partition is good simply for re-installing Ubuntu (or other distros) every 6 months. It saves you from having to restore it from a backup every time.

A good thing about not having one, though, is that it makes you backup every 6 months if you are like myself and want the most shiny updates all of the time.

-M.