this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Keeping
/home
separate is a good call. I can also recommend backups to a different system. Also test those backups.Playing with things can be fun if that is what you enjoy. Being careful is good but the best way to avoid serious issues is being able to recover from the worst case.
Why do you advocate for keeping /home separate?
I personally don't do it because the more partitions you have, the more often you need to fiddle around in GParted when one partition gets full. This is also why I use swap files instead of swap partitions
As far as I can tell, unless you distro-hop, separating /home doesn't have any advantages. Even then, sharing one /home directory between multiple desktop environments can cause some problems
I agree with making and testing backups, though. My current strategy is to back everything up to a 4.2 TiB ZFS pool with daily snapshots on my LAN, and back up the most important data on that to the cloud