How to do a fresh install and protect /home ?

[Sir Light]

Peoples, 

Yea I know that I am coming late into this BUT....

A LONG time ago, I was having the same question myself... so what did I do? Simple... make a /home1 directory and put my home directory in it. Yep.. a separate home directory and partition so that no matter what happens to the install, it will not overlay my home1 directory. 

As an example... here is my edited output from the df command....

 df
Filesystem     1K-blocks     Used Available Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs         4135008        0   4135008   0% /dev
tmpfs            4143740       88   4143652   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs            4143740    20388   4123352   1% /run
/dev/sda3       15480832  7361564   7332888  51% /
tmpfs            4143740        0   4143740   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs            4143740        0   4143740   0% /media
/dev/sda2       15480832 10484776   4209676  72% /oldroot
/dev/dm-1       98045972 66555120  26510408  72% /home1

That is from a fedora setup and you see the /dev/dm-1 that is on my /home1 directory which is my home directory. 

Now.. you may ask, "What is this /dev/dm-1 device for?" That is an encrypted partition using lurks(I think that is the name). 

You see an /oldroot and wondering what is what... simple.... Whenever I install a new release of fedora... guess where it goes? Yep.. the /oldroot partition and the root partition becomes my /oldroot. Why? Simple... so that in case I have any problems with my new install, I have something to fallback to. 

Jon


---- Joseph Sinclair <plug-discussion at stcaz.net> wrote: 
> Unfortunately I have had a different experience; if I use the same username (typical) it copies the skeleton over the user dir, and everything that matches (most things in my case) gets wiped out.
> I learned that the hard way a couple times (fortunately I had backups all but the first time, long ago) before I learned to just backup and rename the homedir for safety, then copy over what I wanted/needed to keep after the upgrade.
> 
> On 01/04/2013 05:35 PM, Dazed_75 wrote:
> > Interesting as I have done this many times without having the user wiped
> > out as long as I am staying in the same family (debian based versus fedora
> > which use a different base uid).  Of course, I was always doing systems
> > which also had only 1 end user so I could count on the old and new uid to
> > be the same (1000 for debian derivatives or 500 for some others).
> > 
> > On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Joseph Sinclair
> > <plug-discussion at stcaz.net>wrote:
> > 
> >> I would add, that you should rename the old user homedir to something else
> >> from single-user-mode before the install, otherwise the account creation
> >> during install will wipe out the existing user home directory.
> >> A good backup before starting is also *very* strongly advised.
> >>
> >> On 01/04/2013 08:39 AM, Dazed_75 wrote:
> >>> If/when you tell the installer to mount sda6 as /home, be sure to use the
> >>> same file system type and if the is a check box for whether to format the
> >>> partition, be sure it remains UN-checked.
> >>>
> >>> On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 12:47 AM, Derek Trotter <expat.arizonan at gmail.com
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>>  While you're installing kubuntu, choose to manually configure
> >>>> partitions.  Either do nothing with /dev/sda6 or choose to mount  it as
> >>>> /home.
> >>>>
> >>>> I have one whole drive for my home directory.  Everything else is
> >>>> installed on another drive.  Recently I tried several distros.  With
> >> each
> >>>> distro I chose the option to configure partitions myself instead of
> >> letting
> >>>> it do the job.  I would either choose during the install to mount that
> >>>> drive as my home directory or do nothing with it during the install and
> >> add
> >>>> it to fstab later.
> >>>>
> >>>>  On 01/04/2013 12:37 AM, joe at actionline.com wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> How can I do a fresh install of kubuntu on one of my systems that now
> >> has
> >>>> a corrupted pclinux installed, but protect the /home partition from
> >> being
> >>>> over-written?  Can this be done safely?
> >>>>
> >>>> 'df' shows the following:
> >>>>
> >>>> /dev/sda1              12G  5.7G  5.6G  51% /
> >>>> tmpfs                 473M     0  473M   0% /dev/shm
> >>>> /dev/sda6             168G   23G  146G  14% /home
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
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