How many home directories for multi boot?

[Buntu Bunny]

Actually, in reading over the links from Old Fred, I'm starting to wonder if I need to separate home from root at all. I'm wondering if I can just create a separate data partition for files I want to preserve through upgrades. If home only contains config files, why would it need it's own partition? A newer release will require new configurations anyway.

[oldfred]

Some users want to preserve the configuration. I do not, but have some configuration settings in a script that I use when I reinstall or test another install. Only a few do I then manually recreate.

But if you want to have same settings the /home is so small that it is easily backed up, unless you have some applications that save lots of data. I moved Firefox & Thunderbird as they are somewhat larger, but I regularly houseclean old emails and do a vacuum & reindex before backing those partitions anyway.

fred@Asusz97:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs           793M  9.6M  784M   2% /run
/dev/sda6        24G  9.4G   14G  42% /
tmpfs           3.9G  544K  3.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           3.9G     0  3.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1       500M   28M  472M   6% /boot/efi
/dev/sdb4       385G  106G  260G  29% /mnt/data
tmpfs           793M   88K  793M   1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sdb9        23G  4.7G   17G  22% /media/fred/2d2d9d53-8df8-4d1b-94a2-3334f552e56d
/dev/sda3        24G   14G  9.4G  59% /mnt/temp
tmpfs           3.9G   32M  3.9G   1% /tmp

My /home is less than a GB.

fred@Asusz97:/home$ sudo du -hc --max-depth=1
[sudo] password for fred: 
824M    ./fred
824M    .
824M    total

I often houseclean this which it turns out is most of my /home:
655M ./.cache

[Buntu Bunny]

Some users want to preserve the configuration. I do not, but have some configuration settings in a script that I use when I reinstall or test another install. Only a few do I then manually recreate.

But if you want to have same settings the /home is so small that it is easily backed up, unless you have some applications that save lots of data. I moved Firefox & Thunderbird as they are somewhat larger, but I regularly houseclean old emails and do a vacuum & reindex before backing those partitions anyway.

OldFred, thanks! I can definitely see wanting to save browser bookmarks and some emails. Settings for older versions Gimp and Scribus seem less important. So a separate /home is a good idea, along with a data partition.