On 12/17/2017 03:04 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
On 12/17/2017 11:55 AM, fred roller wrote:
Main thing to remember is KISS.  This is a simple way to have the normal drop points of data redirected to the larger drive.

If you really want to KISS, just migrate /home to the new drive and be done with it.
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Hold on a minute, Joe. If I understand Fred correctly, the system does certain things to the /home directory and each user directory that he did not repeat /not/ want preserved, and no one else should, either. And I can believe it. I've noticed some flakiness when slavishly preserving my main user directory, that didn't happen when I simply "created" my other "users" /de novo/ with every clean install. The flakiness gets worse with every iteration. (You developers who are monitoring this list, are you monitoring this thread? Consider this my formal protest of a certain amount of carelessness, hint, hint, hint!) I attribute that to the kind of hidden file that needs doing away with.

I would add ~/bin to the list, plus a few others I've created, along with a custom bashrc script that sets the PATH to include my own bin directory. But otherwise his principle is a sound one.

I at first thought as you do, Joe: just mount the larger directory as /home and have done with it. I used to do just that when I jerry-built systems having more than one HDD, that I had cobbled together from a few "antique" systems. The problem: that still leaves the system to throw things into /home that one can best do away with. One can do that most easily by doing clean installations on the system drive with every iteration, or at least every other iteration.

Now I have one more question, and this is for Fred or Stan. Should any physical directories named Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Video, etc., remain on the actual /home mount? Or should they exist physically only on the /crypt mount (meaning the larger user-data drive) and only symlinks remain in ~? (Remember: ~ = /home/username where /username/ is the name of the user account.) Understand: I want a clean separation between useful data on the one hand, and configuration on the other--except for things like Thunderbird where I want to preserve e-mail accounts and extensive e-mail databases. (I understand why you didn't bother with Chrome's configuration data. But what about Firefox?)

I genuinely appreciate this discussion and the direction it has taken, more than some of you might know. I've had a bellyful of the flakiness that gets worse with every "system upgrade" I've done--to the point where even KDE's Apper program crashes on launch every single time.

I wonder: am I the first here to build a system with all SDD drives? Or has any other subscriber to this list done that?

Temlakos