How to Store Your Personal Home Files on a Separate Disk on Linux
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ส.ค. 2024
- Many modern computers have more than one storage disk, often a small yet fast solid state drive for the operating system and a larger hard drive for all your files. This video covers how to set up your Home folder with all your files on the larger drive, Bothe during Linux installation, or after you've already installed your system and want to move the files over.
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Twitter: @PlanetLinux98
Video Sections:
0:00 Introduction
1:51 Installing Linux with a separate Home disk
9:03 Moving existing Home folder to a separate disk
23:05 Conclusion - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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Recommended to use the UUID number to identify the drive/partition in the /etc/fstab file rather than the /dev/sdXY notation as the UUID never changes whereas the /dev/sdXY notation can change if another device is connected to the system. A well explained video anyway!
That’s a great point! That’s definitely a more certain way to ensure you’re working with the correct drive.
And please also consider the alternative LABEL= method of identifying a partition or volume. UUIDs indeed guarantee uniqueness, but provide nothing to indicate to the human sysadmin the content in the volume. Trust me, once you've got more that 3 or so UUID='s in your fstab file, you're going to want self-documentation about which is which.
Also, to greatly lower the risk in manually editing /etc/fstab [and this applies for any sensitive file], incrementally edit a series of them, starting with fstab.000, then fstab.001, and so on. Then make a symlink to the latest one. I suggest putting the removal of the old symlink and setting the new one in a single compound command like, such as "unlink $F; symlink $F.004 $F" [where $F = fstab, or whatever sensitive file you're editing]. Here, "symlink" was aliased to "ln -s". If you run into trouble, you just roll back the symlink to the previous version. This will save you MANY headaches.
@@jimwinchester339 @blokey5160 you both make very good points that give greater data security but how do you go about this? {complete newby to Linux using Zorin 17 just updated from 15. Ive experienced an upgrade without protecting data and escaped but I dont wish to repeat.
It would be great if you both could get together with Planet Linux to create a version 2 of this video?
This is a great suggestion to prevent future snafus! Of course, it also assumes a great amount of linux command line knowledge. 👍@@jimwinchester339
FINALLY I've stumbled across someone who can explain Linux to me in a way I can understand and follow. This video was just perfect. Thank you so much.
I’m so glad you found it helpful and easy to understand!
This is an excellent tutorial. You're not showing off, and you're not talking down to your audience. And the content is clearly explained. This earns you a new subscriber. 👍
Thank you for the kind words. Glad you found it helpful, and thanks for subscribing! 😀
@@PlanetLinuxChannel @ 7:15 - why do you NOT "format" sda1, the EFI system partition? (the check-box is not checked).
If you’re doing a clean installation of Linux and don’t have any other operating systems on the system (not dual-booting) then you probably could format the EFI partition. But if you’re planning on keeping any existing data from a previous installation (like a pre-existing /home folder) or you have another operating system installed, then you won’t want to format it as it contains information about the prior installed systems and anything else that’s installed would become unbootable.
@@PlanetLinuxChannel (D'oh!) 🤓That makes sense. Thanks.
Thank you so much for creating this tutorial! I will need to upgrade my Linux Mint version soon, and this will be so helpful.
Glad you’re finding it useful!
Thank you!!!! Your step by step instructions made all the difference!
I've been trying to find how to do this for literal years and it's been a big reason I haven't switched to Linux yet. It seems so basic, but no combination of search terms brought up how to do it. This is exactly what I wanted, thank you!
So glad you were able to find the video and that it helped you out! Welcome to the Linux community! Hope you enjoy the journey!
Thank You. a perfect easy to follow step by step guide for a newbie Linux user. Greatly appreciated.
This is very very underrated. You are explaining things like teaching a child. Very detailed. I am certainly waiting for more tricks with terminal ( sudo )
I’ll see about doing some more videos like this in the future, and possibly focusing some on the terminal.
Terminal is the wrong approach. This is the "next century." Linux should be more leaning towards solutions in the GRAPHICAL mode, rather than 1980's DOS like command line.
Thanks for the tutorial, I was able to use this 2 years after the video
Glad I could help! It’s great to know that the content is still relevant years later.
this tutorial saved me!!! easy to understand and follow along, couldn't have done it without you!
So glad you found it helpful!
BIG THANK YOU! It has been a week i was trying to figure this out...
You've saved me like a month of investigation, thank you so much for this detailed and yet not complicated tutorial, now I can safely move from Windows to Linux Mint!
You sir, are an excellent teacher. This was a terrific tutorial and was exactly what I was looking for. I just installed mint on the smaller SSD and realized that I unintentionally created a dual boot system as windows was still installed on the disk drive. I wanted to do exactly what this tutorial covers however, I think I will just reinstall since it's brand-spanking new lol!
You just saved me hahaha, been wondering how to to do this in a simple fashion being new to Linux. Thank you.
Thank you so much, It's 1am In my country and luckily you save my day. You deserve more subscribes.
Happy to hear the video helped you! Thank you for the kind words.
Its worked!!! Took me 8hrs to finally get it all fixed. The first tutorial messed up my hard drive and put me in emergency mode. Urs worked
Happy to hear you were able to resolve the issue.
Exceptionally good explanation which I can follow as a beginner and not just retire something but learn what I’m doing. Thanks!
Thanks! Glad you found it helpful! Good luck on your Linux journey, and I hope my content can continue to help!
Many thanks for making this video. It was really useful.
Glad you found it helpful!
Man you are really a linux god, explained really well!
Thank you! I’m just doing my best to share my knowledge and experiences with others as I continue to learn more.
Outstanding instructional video. You earned a like and a sub. Thanks, Elliot
Excellent video!! Thanks so much for your clear explanation!! 😀
Thank you!
You just got a new subscriber! awsome explanation. Thank you
Thanks for the sub! Glad you found the content helpful.
Great video! Thanks for sharing!😉
Very Helpful Video, I learned a lot. Thank You!
Glad you found it helpful!
Useful, good explanation,very good and thanks a lot
So so helpful, thank you.
Glad you found it helpful!
Thanks for the video, so I have joined your channel to see more cheers Bob in the UK
Glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for subscribing!
Cheers from Canada!
I already did it by myself but it was a great tutorial with great knowledge and a very good explanation.
Thanks. Glad you liked it!
Appreciate the video. Helped me out.
Thanks! Glad you found it helpful!
Thank you. Well explained and easy to follow. Been playing with a RISC V Starfive 2 running a Debian variant and this worked very well with a nvme second drive. I might use the UUID= ident. in fstab though.
Thank you. A great explanation. I sub'd.
My first time to your channel. Great explanation of how to do those things. I set my system up this way many years ago, and now I'm getting ready to move from Linux Lite 2.8 based on Ubuntu 14 LTS over to MX-23 Linux. I have never done a distro replacement before, but from all I have read, it's suggested that I rename the /home directory to something like /home-backup (lives on my second drive of course), then do the installation of the new OS replacing my existing old Linux product and reboot. I will need to also move some files in .config to bring over my old setups for things like Google Chrome and Firefox, etc. I'm still doing research to insure I have not forgotten anything and of course I'll take full backups of my boot drive and 2nd drive before attempting to do this. Everyone has to do it at least every 4 years, but it's hard to find videos explaining how to do it to preserve your settings and all of your /home directory files, but I'm learning every day. Thanks again for sharing this information, I have subscribed and will be watching more of your channel.
Glad you found it helpful! Did you have any luck with the replacement install?
@@PlanetLinuxChannel I will let you know after I complete the upgrade how it went. I'm not planning to complete it until after April 15th 2024. I don't want to mess up my machine before my taxes are done, LOL.
That’s probably a good idea!
Excellent!!!
Thank you. I hope you found it helpful!
tysm for the tutorial!!
You’re most welcome! Glad you found it helpful.
Thank you so much !!
You’re very welcome! I hope you found it helpful.
Thank you.
You’re welcome! Hope you found it helpful!
Very well explained! I'm a beginner and I must say your videos are some of the best.
I'm going to do what you are explaining in this video but I have a question: how can I set up /home in two hdd in raid 1 (mirrored)?
Thank you for your work. 👍
Thank you for the positive feedback! Before I could answer your question, I have one of my own. Are the drives already set up as a RAID array or would you want to do this when you partition your drives / set up your /home folder?
@@PlanetLinuxChannel My old system: SSD with Windows 10 + 2 HDD mirrored . I want to change to Ubuntu and change the old disks so I have now a new SSD with Ubuntu 20.10 and I have to install 2 x 4TB HDD in RAID 1.
Thanks. I haven’t personally done this before, but I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction with the knowledge and research I’ve accumulated.
There is a program called Raider that should allow you to do this. You would install your system to the SSD, putting /home on your first hard drive (as done in the video). After install you would download the Raider application and run it in the terminal to create the mirror from your first hard drive to the second (still empty) one.
More details about it here: raider.sourceforge.net
Alternatively you could do a more manual process. In the live USB environment (before installing) use gparted (or parted in the terminal) to create a petition of all the space, apply the change, then set the “raid” flag. Do this on both hard drives.
Then (still in the live environment) install the mdadm command-line application (it should be in your distro’s software centre) and use it to create the raid array.
For more info and a sort of sample guide, check this article: linuxconfig.org/how-to-setup-raid1-on-linux
I hope this helps or at least gets you headed in the right direction. Best of luck!
very helpful, but us non english spoken, it would be useful to texte all you do on vdo. however, this is the best explanations i never found in my researches.
Thank you for the feedback! I will consider displaying more steps as text or writing them in the description.
Thank you
You’re very welcome. I hope you found it helpful!
Thank you for this easy to follow video. If I had to re-install ubuntu would I just create the files on the smaller disc and leave the larger disk alone?
I have a 2TB disk with LM19.3 that was using up the whole space so after following yr great tutorial I moved all my /home files to a /home partition on a second disk. But now when I try to install LM21.1 on a 250GB at the beginning of the large disk the install crashes. What do you think? Is this caused by the separate /home partition?
Thank you for the easy to understand video. I've been frustrated with many of the videos about the same topic. But what should I do if I have a legacy motherboard and not UEFI?
The process shouldn’t be much different. I’ll look into it to see what I can find.
@@PlanetLinuxChannel So it turns out my board is actually UEFI but loads up is UEFI + Legacy. Your video still helped a lot. Thank you! I've subscribed :D
That makes sense. Glad you’ve sorted it out.
Great vid. but, Stuck at moving "sudo mv /home /home1", getting error message that states " Device or resource busy". Can you advise me on how to make this work?
Using Mint 21.3
Thank you
I have a 4TB HDD already with files, but at less than 50% capacity. Can I use the remaining 50% space for my /root directory, transfer all my files to it, and then expend it?
Very good explained, but I have a question, i tried to move /home on hdd from ssd but I watched another tut and after I did everything great, but when I restart the pc I see that I can t login and I was chatched on a login loop, I understand the problem is that /boot dir isn t on the same drive like /home or smth, can you please tell me that if I do everything like you explained on the tut, is the risk that can I get this problem again after i do everything like in you re tut? Thank you!
I’ve not personally had that problem, so I think that doing the steps in this video should work. However, if you are already experiencing the issue, foe may need to re-install and do the partitioning during the installation as I detail in the first half of the video. If reinstalling, you would lose your existing data so you’d want a backup of anything important first.
What i am trying to do.
i have an extra ssd drive where is all my user files, with this i mean : documents, audio, video, music & downloads have their own harddisk. Like this (in windows) after fresh install all i have to do is assign the folders to become my video, documents, music etc folder. it is very easy to do in windows (rightclick the folder) so if my windows ssd breaks i will never lose anything because all my important files are on a seperate ssd.
In Linux (mint) which i installed this night and is test running there seems to be no option to do this?
i don't want to move something, it is fresh install so there is nothing.
I use old T/W 520/530 Thinkpads. I can have as many as 3 onboard hdds, one mSATA in the cellular chip slot under the keyboard, one in the usual "main" slot, and a 3rd in the swap bay hdd all buss connected. VERY much better and faster than a USB connected external drive.
That is some pretty impressive expansion!
Question: if the snap folder moves with the home folder into the slow HDD, does that mean that programs will be installed to the HDD and will boot up slowly?
If the distro you’re using uses a swap file (such is the case with recent versions of Ubuntu and its derivatives) the default location for the swap file is usually on the root of the file system, so it shouldn’t move with the home directory.
That said, if it did get moved to the slower HDD for some reason, programs should still install to and load from whichever drive the root system (/) is installed or mounted to. The only downside of swap being on the slower HDD would be if your system runs low on memory / RAM and some of the open app data has to be transferred to and read from swap. In other words, you might notice a slightly higher performance hit when you run low on memory, but otherwise shouldn’t notice any significant differences.
@@PlanetLinuxChannel thanks mate, just did the procedure and it worked like a charm! and it does appear that the programs are all still on the ssd while the files are on my hdd. thanks again!
Glad to hear it. Cheers!
if you have programs installed on the home disk and you move the disk to somewhere else, say a laptop, that has the same linux. Will those programs work?
Theoretically it might be possible to get working, but there would probably be complications. Firstly, many programs aren’t typically installed in /home, but rather other places under the root system (the program just puts config files in home). So unless you’ve explicitly put entire programs in your home directory, that’s not where many of them would go by default.
Even assuming they are on the /home disk though, there are other potential issues. The new system might not recognize that they’re installed, or the programs may rely on other dependencies (other packages / libraries / programs) that were also on the first system, but not the new one, therefore not working as expected or at all.
If you want to transfer your entire set of installed packages from one system to another of the SAME distro, you might be able to use apt-clone (in the case of Debian / Mint / Ubuntu-based systems) as detailed in this forum response: unix.stackexchange.com/a/208163
Hope that helps point you in the right direction!
*Will that method keep the timestamps of the original files and folders?*
how can i just mount the desktop folder from home directory which is now on HDD at SSD to increase the speed of the softwares and tools on the Desktop
'
That would depend. Is the main root system (/) on the SSD, and you want /home on HDD except for /home/[user]/Desktop, which would be on SSD?
Is there any reason why you couldn't relocate sun folders? A set up in thinking of is to have root on my smallest, fastest drive. /home on a second SSD and then /home/photos on a much larger hard drive.
So a three drive set up.
My reasoning is I have a lot of photos.
That makes sense and should be doable following a similar process to moving /home on an existing installation. I’d have to look into it more to see if there would be any discrepancies, so I’d back up my data first if I were you before trying it! 🙂
What if i just want to move specific folders in home folder like i just want move download folder??
Any way to use both at the same time and choose which drive to install what as it is in Windows?
Sorry, I guess I’m not quite sure what you’re asking. You want to use both drives simultaneously for something?
I have Linux on one m.2 drive and Windows on a second m.2 drive, and am using a 3rd SSD for my User folders in Windows. I would like to use this 3rd drive for both systems though... it's NTFS. Am I able to move my Linux pictures, music, downloads, folders (not the entire Home dir) to this drive, or does it have to be EXT4? I already have it auto-mounting at boot. Thanks!
Do you want to put your actual “Downloads”, “Pictures”, etc folders on that drive or create separate folders on that drive that you can freely move things from your main Linux system drive over to?
As Linux can certainly read and write to NTFS partitions, I don’t see any reason that it couldn’t work.
@@PlanetLinuxChannel Thanks! Sorry, I figured it out and forgot to delete my question. Yes, I moved them to my shared drive. It was almost as simple as with Windows. Wish I'd known ages ago.
Glad it’s working well for you!
I am new to Linux If i got it right i can outsurce /Home/User/Downloads to a noter Drive and it will act as the native folder? o,O
That’s true. You could apply the same principles shown when moving an existing home folder (after installation) in order to move just the /home/[user]/Downloads folder onto a different partition or drive.
Hey, in 17:04 after following everything you do typing sudo mv /home /home1 gives me an error saying cannot move /home to /home1 : device or resource busy! What is the problem here? Btw great video.
I am using parrot os just in case that helps you
That’s an interesting issue. When doing this, do you by chance have your existing home folder on a separate partition or drive from the rest of the system?
@@PlanetLinuxChannel I got this error as well. Installed Nobaro on a single drive. I have 2 extra SSD's in the PC. I want one of them to hold the home folder seperately but it gives the error.
How much space is required for / and /home if we partition manually?
If you’re just separating /home from the rest of the system (/), then a clean installation will still require about the same amount of space for / as there isn’t yet much of anything in /home. Most distros require or recommend somewhere around 10-20 GB, but you’d want to make / larger if you want to install numerous apps, since that’s where they’ll be stored.
Your /home really just needs to be as big as you want to store all your personal files / data, along with the occasional config file that applications might store there.
What happens if you want good OPSEC and want to have your personal hard drive with /home on it LUKS encrypted?
How will the system boot? and is it able to be booted without a /home
I’d have to dig way deeper into this to give a concrete answer, but I believe that if you have your drive configured with LU, you should still be able to move your /home directory to it. So long as you edit your /etc/fstab file to mount the drive automatically, and I believe you also need to add a line to /etc/crypttab to unlock the drive (something like “home /dev/sdx# none luks,discard” replacing sdx# with the correct drive.
I found a forum post related to this, but they’re looking to have separate partitions on the same drive, and it doesn’t look like the solution would apply here. But perhaps it’ll point you in the right direction if my limited insight didn’t? superuser.com/questions/1726142/luks-with-separate-home-within-encrypted-volume#:~:text=It%20is%20possible%20to%20have%20%2Fhome%20as%20a,LVM%20under%20LUKS.%20The%20answer%20would%20be%20to
@@PlanetLinuxChannel Oh was just a random thought.
Usually I keep the OS and /home folder on the same hard disk. I recently switched to Linux about 3 months ago, and have a pretty cool BunsenLabs setup on a 16GB USB that runs as both a VTOY file and the same file can be imported into Hyper-V, so changes in the system match.
I wanna share it out, but was wondering just in case other people want to have a larger space with a /home on another drive.
It's doable to just DD the VTOY file onto a larger device but resizing the LUKS its a bit finicky for other people, just asking in case they want to have their /home on an encrypted drive.
That’s a cool scenario. I’m pretty sure it can be done, but I don’t know exactly if or what setup would need to be done with the /home drive to get it working.
Something I ran into was with virtual machines. QEMU/KVM/Virt Manager defaults to saving virtual machines in the root directory. I moved the VM storage directory to inside Home on the second disk.
Are you having an issue with it? Pretty sure you can change where VMs are stored in the VM app (e.g virt-manager)
Thanks. I did that after my system threw a tantrum because the root partition filled up with VMs. II know to change the default save path in the future now.@@PlanetLinuxChannel
Hi Planet Linux! My 500gb ssd is almost full so I installed a second 1T ssd for my Home folder. I followed your video step by step for moving /home on an already installed Linux Mint. The problem that I have now is that Linux Mint doesn't accept my admin password. It doesn't show invalid password but the screen appears black for a moment and then again the field for password is shown.
Sorry for the late response. Have you had any luck?
Hi! It is great video, I followed it step by step. The only problem that I have now is that Linux Mint doesn't accept my admin password. It doesn't show invalid password but the screen appears black for a moment and then again the field for password is shown.
Thanks. Was this to move your home folder after the system was already installed?
Is this also applyable for Fedor 37?
It should, though I’ll have to double-check.
Been doing this for over a year now-- and it's encrypted too... and an external backup stored elsewhere-- NOT on any damn cloud-- never put stuff on the "cloud"-- where any govt. group or anyone with $$$ can get to it easily!!
Yeah, it’s definitely hard to trust what any company will do with your data. Even if some of them have good intentions, there’s always the possibility of hacks or leaks.
Now, show us what to do if the os drive fails and we add a new drive for the os while keeping our home.
Ooh, good idea. Perhaps I’ll cover that in a future video.
What if my windows already has 2 partitions under one ssd. I want to have the home under the larger partition. Your setup in this video shows that you have 2 disk drives Is that correct?
Yes I was using two separate desks in the video. Although you can do it with two partitions on the same disk.
However, if I’m understanding correctly, you want to put /home on the same partition as you have a Windows install? I’m not certain, but I don’t think that would work. Theoretically you could try to set the mount point to /home for that NTFS partition that has Windows data, but I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to.
@@PlanetLinuxChannel no sorry for the confusion I will be reformatting the disk and create 2 partitions one for root and one for home, haven't thought about UEFI & swap though not sure how to go about that since I am coming from windows.
For EFI, it just needs to be a small FAT32 partition (about 500MB) at the beginning of the disk, and you’ll choose to “Use as EFI/ESP”. On Ubuntu or any Ubuntu-based distro (like Linux Mint” you don’t actually need to create a swap partition, as it will automatically create a dynamically-sizeable swap file in the main file system.
@@PlanetLinuxChannel managed to make this work but not on the initial install since there's too many partition showing and are ntfs so I had to wipe all and reinstall the 2nd time with the correct partition.
Was hoping for information about how you use this setup to restore a broken system.
That’s definitely a good video topic. Are you referring to a system that has to be re-installed and migrating the previous install’s home folder over to the new install? If your home directory was already on a separate drive / partition, then you could do that very easily by only formatting the root (/) partition and installing to it, but keep your existing /home partition without formatting.
If they’re not separate and you’re talking about retroactively pulling your home directory over when you have to re-install, I suspect you’d have to use the live image to copy your /home somewhere so that you could migrate it over after install. I’ll do some research into that and could always do a video in the future.
@@PlanetLinuxChannel definitely a reinstall of same distro and DE. But also what if you are distro hopping? Is having this separate home directory as useful? Would stuff in your home dir cause problems or even simply you'd gather "orphaned" garbage over time, depending on the new distros and DEs?
In the case of distro hopping, it can occasionally cause issues with some system or app preferences. Most system-level configurations aren’t managed in the home folder, so they’re usually fine, so you probably won’t run into a new distro not working, but perhaps the occasional app or setting you would need to reconfigure.
Install linux without overwriting a separate partition for the home directory?
Yes. When installing, be sure to choose manual partitioning or “something else” and install the base system to one partition mounted at “/“, formatting it. Then edit your existing /home partition to be mounted at “/home” and do NOT format it if you want to keep your existing home data.
If you’re going to do that though, make sure you set up the exact same username and computer name during install. Otherwise the existing file permissions will be all messed up (you will no longer “own” any of your existing files since they’d be assigned to a different username).
Thank you. I am using an Ubuntu guest VM in VirtualBox, under a windows host. I successfully added a new drive and moved my /home directory to it. I deleted my original /home and re-implemented it as a mount point for the separate home directory. The system boots correctly with the new home directory. I will backup everything, then try the install and keep the new home intact.
Glad to hear it’s worked so far. Best of luck with the install!
I partitioned in D drive , Now i can't see the D drive in my windows, I've Ubuntu and Windows 10 dual boot . can you please help me undo this process and help me access D drive through Windows
To better assist, did you partition that drive in Windows or Linux? (What app did you use?) As well, what partitions did you set up on it?
If you only created a Linux partition (ext4, Btrfs, etc.) on it, then that typically won’t appear in the Windows File Explorer (Windows doesn’t know how to read those). So you’d probably have to create an additional partition on the drive that uses a file system that both Windows and Linux can read (NTFS, ExFAT, etc.)
We're on NVME gen 5 right now, kind of strange watching a video telling people we're still using HDDs.
Oh there’s gen 5 all right, but I still see new PCs that ship with a smaller SSD (often NVMe) and a larger HDD. It’s finally becoming less common, but I still see it far too often! And a lot of existing computers people had bought years ago are in that situation.
This is a perfect example of human-friendly tutorials we need to wean people off Windows.
What if i just want to move specific folders in home folder like i just want move download folder??