More space to /home

**vanadium** · December 12th, 2012

As a temporary lapstop, you could use some free space in the root partition to store data (create a directory there, change the owner to your user account and create a symbolic link to it in your home directory). Once home, you can make a decent backup and repartition without risking your personal data.

**Sarys** · December 13th, 2012

Originally Posted by audiomick

Are you travelling? Can you get a hold of a USB stick? Perhaps you can get one of them, and just shovel a bit of data off onto there to ease the space problem until you get home.

I would use the new drive as the main one. Install everything on it, get it all set up, and then transfer the files from the old drive to the appropriate place on the new. I would then use the 500GB drive to backup to. If you do your backups as compressed files (.tar), then that should be enough room.

The main thing is to not have really important stuff on only one drive. Having it on two different drives in one machine is already good enough. Having your stuff on two drives in two different locations is, of course, better. There might be a fire, or a burglary, or something. But the main thing is to have a second copy should the drive fail.

If the desktop can't take both drives, think about getting an external enclosure for the second drive.

With both of those drives in the desktop, you should also have room to back up the laptop to the desktop.

My desktop has space for 3 hard drives. But yeah I was told that you should have back up in at least 3 places if you care about your data. For example in my school our teachers lost all of their email because the mail servers hard disk failed. They did have backup disk but it failed at the same time.

**audiomick** · December 13th, 2012

Originally Posted by Sarys

back up in at least 3 places if you care about your data. For example in my school our teachers lost all of their email because the mail servers hard disk failed. They did have backup disk but it failed at the same time.

Bad luck to have two disks fail at once. I suppose if the power supply goes feral, it might take them all out...

Yes, separate locations is of course better, but two drives in one machine is still better than only one.

**Sarys** · December 13th, 2012

Originally Posted by audiomick

Bad luck to have two disks fail at once. I suppose if the power supply goes feral, it might take them all out...

Yes, separate locations is of course better, but two drives in one machine is still better than only one.

Agreed

**Sarys** · December 17th, 2012

But how to back up ubuntu and win 7 so that they don't take too much space?

**3rdalbum** · December 17th, 2012

Originally Posted by Sarys

But how to back up ubuntu and win 7 so that they don't take too much space?

Don't back up your whole operating system; just back up the files in your /home and My Documents, My Music, My Photos etc.

An external hard drive is a good bet. I actually have an internal hard disk and a hard disk dock; the hard disk sits on the dock, and the dock plugs into the computer's USB port. The dock accepts any SATA hard disk and it's trivial to pull the disk out and put a different one in.

If you're getting a new hard disk, why not consider putting your operating systems on the 500 gig, and your /home on the 1 TB? That's similar to what I do. Or if you can really only spare 40 gigs for Ubuntu, use only one partition for Ubuntu. You can still do a clean install without losing your files.

**fdrake** · December 17th, 2012

just a question: wouldn't be easier and faster to take some spage from your root-partition, creat a new partition ext3 or fat and then mount the partition automatically with fstab. In the end the results it's the same more space for your data....