Move your home directory to a new drive

[@ivanobuffa]

Hi Jeremy... along with Indians here there's an Italian guy (living in Ireland) watching this video. Thank you for making this video. Appreciate it! Keep it up :)

[@Practical-IT]

Thanks for watching. One of the perks that keeps me going is feedback from all over the world. I'm glad you found some value in this video.

[@antonywright3778]

I had a lot of problems trying top achieve thios usung other tutorials. Them not working caused a lot of confusion. As a newbee to Linux, I was seriously tempted to change the server back to windows but thought I would give it one more go when I found your tutorial. Im glad to say its been a success. I just wish I had found your tutorial much earlier. A hugh thanks for the guidence.

[@Practical-IT]

Thanks! It's comments like this that keep me making videos.

[@carlitos11693]

Thank you. Excellent tutorial. quick and to the point, No fat, just substance

[@Practical-IT]

I appreciate the feedback. I can't take all the credit for this. I followed an existing written tutorial which I linked in the description.

[@jjock3239]

I was using the terminal a lot more 20 years ago, and was a great fan of Gentoo Linux. I became quite conversant with doing installations and having the /home partition on a different drive. Years passed, I stopped using the terminal, and so, when it came to doing the /home directory back-up and setting up the the /home partition to a separate drive, I just about had a nervous breakdown. Thank goodness I found your easy and straightforward instructions for the process. Using rsync, I have the /home drive from the other system backed up, I have the new /home drive formatted, and am ready to move the data tomorrow.

[@Practical-IT]

I'm glad this video helped. When I saw the article linked in the description I was pretty sure that it would make a good video. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

[@alecmanning9177]

Amazing tutorial, used this for moving my movies dir on a jellyfin server to a new LVM partition. Keep up the quality content!

[@Practical-IT]

Glad it helped!

[@AnonymousB460]

Awesome video. Other videos explaining mount migrations were messy. I'm going to use your steps for /var. However I do recommend using lvm. Easy to expand if needed.

[@dyllanbentley4361]

Appreciate the video 2 years later!

[@Practical-IT]

Glad it was useful.

[@cseale61]

Nice! I use Pop, so this was great.

[@Practical-IT]

Great to hear!

[@minthantzin7319]

Thanks a lot.It's very helpful for me.

[@ayasutatar9147]

Thanks man! Great Job.

[@jnmldo]

Thank you so much for your video!

[@stefanobaldacci5799]

Great help thank you very much

[@Practical-IT]

Glad it helped

[@dhruvagrawat]

Great video 💯 is there any way i can expand my root directory for arch linux or I'll have to reinstall it

[@Practical-IT]

If you have room on the drive to expand root, you could do it. In all honesty though, I would backup and reinstall instead.

[@dhruvagrawat]

going for reinstall thanks 🙏🏻

[@jim7smith]

Good explanation, however I really would like to see the procedure to actually do another base os install and acquire the /home on the separate drive. Maybe it is so simple i am missing it.

[@Practical-IT]

Great suggestion!

[@fernandopc315]

Excellent!

[@Practical-IT]

Many thanks!

[@vgfxworks]

read somewhere about creating a log file in the process: @ 6:04 rsync -hiva --log-file=log.txt home /media/user/home

[@SyberPrepper]

Cool. Thanks!

[@Practical-IT]

You're welcome.

[@aaronjoseph4591]

Really simple tutorial and effective way, appreciate your effort and knowledge ❤. But I do have a question, creating new users will their home directory be also in the other drive, where does the installation files (like some git cloned repos) goes. Thanks 😊

[@Practical-IT]

When creating new users after you've moved /home they will be under /home in the new location. The old location no longer exists.

[@adestrella]

Great Tutorial

[@enzanto]

super helpful video!

[@Practical-IT]

Thanks! I appreciate the feedback.

[@ZHW-m9b]

This is helpful. But when operating "rsync", I think it's better to use "rsync -av /home/. /home_old" to sync hidden files too.

[@ZHW-m9b]

Sorry, I forgot hidden files usually don't exist in /home directory. : )

[@brunoscotto4549]

well that's a RIP on my end, got a error he couldn't found ext4 partition even tho I've done the same thing in the video.

[@Practical-IT]

Are you doing this on a VM or physical machine? Was your disk actually formatted with EXT4 to begin with? What distribution are you running? Pop!_OS was used for this video. For the video, I followed the instructions from the OSTechnix article here: ostechnix.com/move-home-directory-to-new-partition-in-linux/ Keep in mind that this video was published in March of 2022, and there may have been changes that have happened between then and now that could break or change this process. Without more context and/or access to the machine, I'm afraid I cannot be a lot of help. You did have a backup before you tried to follow this video, didn't you?

[@brunoscotto4549]

@@Practical-IT Hello thanks for that concern, I was doing it on a VM, my disk was formated EXT4, I was running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Everything work fine until I reboot. And I figured out WHY it did that. So I'll explain why it buged out. This VM was installed by some "new IT" and he installed it on SDB, when I install a new disk it became SDA (you already smell the calamity comming), when I moved the /home toward SDA the whole system though it was the main disk and decided to boot on it even tho it was a secondary disk making it unable to be boot again. Fortunately this vm was not even 12H old and very little was lost (some config file that took 2 hours to re-make and the whole installation who took 2 extra hours). TLDR : Make sur to always install grub on SDA otherwise you'll have nightmare later on. Also thank to your video I've now re-install this vm with SDA as main disk, SDB1 as /home/user data and SDB2 as /home/common that's used for shared folder with a samba shared folder. So thanks for your video because even if some mistakes were made it all end well (exept few hours loss it's no big deal).

[@Practical-IT]

@Bruno Scotto thank you for the follow-up. This kind of explanation is extremely useful for others in the community.