On Sat, 16 Dec 2017 10:13:55 -0500 fred roller fredroller66@gmail.com wrote:
I have done this type of set up on my systems before so what its worth I will share how I installed and where applicable, why.
Good read. I'll keep it around for future reference.
| 5. In general, should I place a partition for anything other than /home on the 1 TB SSD? This will explain how/why I put /home on the 120 [smaller drive]. Through the use of hard/soft links to folders in /Crypt I connected the data files I wanted to preserve on /Crypt. This use of links kept data writing to /Crypt and in so doing kept it separate from the OS drive. So /home/user1/Documents -->/Crypt/user1/Documents, /home/user1/Pictures --> /Crypt/user1/Pictures, etc. etc. This link was invisible to the user. The data files from software likewise can be linked, /home/user1/.thunderbird --> /Crypt/user1/.thunderbird; which was great for recovering the mail client and other softeware. This set-up was born of having put /home on /Crypt at first but if you migrated to a new distro or recovered from failure you tended to inherit artifacts which the new system choked on. This process proved to be a cleaner foundation from which to recover/reinstall. One had only reinstall a clean OS on the 120 then re-link, the data was never touched during the installation process. Proved so effective that I preferred do clean installs from OS iteration to the next as opposed to upgrading. There are some pros/cons to soft/hard links so research for the trade-offs.
Mostly I replied because I wanted to give a thumbs up to doing things this way. I also do this, and it makes everything so much easier, and safer, and convenient.