Setting Up a Separate Data Partition

Now that I went through the process of learning how to move /home to a separate partition, I learn that it isn't always the best practice. Actually, if one is running multiple versions of Linux, it can cause problems because configuration files are stored for each user in the /home folder and they will rarely be compatible from one installation to the next.

Still, I learned a lot and can apply what I learned to an even better alternative—keeping /home on the root partition but having a common, separate /data partition. This way, you can easily backup the configuration files in your small /home folder if you want (although this data won't typically be as important as user documents, etc.)—even back it up to the /data partition—and keep them separate to each installation (if you have multiple on one machine), while storing all of your documents, photos, videos, audio, etc. on the one, separate /data partition. Pretty smart idea I got from the Ubuntu Forums.

I plan to implement this soon, and many of the same principles and steps from moving /home to a separate partition will apply to setting up a separate /data partition.