this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Heya folks, some people online told me I was doing partitions wrong, but I’ve been doing it this way for years. Since I’ve been doing it for years, I could be doing it in an outdated way, so I thought I should ask.

I have separate partitions for EFI, /, swap, and /home. Am I doing it wrong? Here’s how my partition table looks like:

  • FAT32: EFI
  • BTRFS: /
  • Swap: Swap
  • Ext4: /home

I set it up this way so that if I need to reinstall Linux, I can just overwrite / while preserving /home and just keep working after a new install with very few hiccups. Someone told me there’s no reason to use multiple partitions, but several times I have needed to reinstall the OS (Linux Mint) while preserving /home so this advice makes zero sense for me. But maybe it was just explained to me wrong and I really am doing it in an outdated way. I’d like to read what you say about this though.

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[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have daily backups for brtfs but for my / only via Linux Mint’s Timeshift. I do manual backups for some of my home folders every week. I take it the backups you mention would be lost over a reinstall?

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A backup is only a backup if it's not connected to the computer (ideally in a different building), so it wouldn't be lost with a reinstall.

[–] mambabasa@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

Makes sense, thanks.