[K12OSN] moving /home to separate drive

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2004-10-21 at 15:02, dale wrote:
> > Now you should be able to choose to NOT erase the new /home partition 
> > when you to a clean install of 4.1
> > 
> > Anyone have something else to add?
> Everything sounds good.  I would add that if you need to keep downtime 
> to a minimum, you can replace cp with 2 runs of rsync.  rsync old home 
> to new home once while the server is in normal mode (3 or 5).  Then 
> bring it into single user mode and rsync again.  The second run of rsync 
> will be short as only a few files should be different.  I used this 
> method in the past when upgrading a harddrive on my mail server.

A few more thoughts:   /home doesn't really need to be a separate
drive, just a separate partition so you can tell the installer
not to format it.  Also, after you remount a new partition on
top of the existing /home directory (if it wasn't a mount point
before) you won't be able to access the files under it or remove
them to recover the space.  To avoid that issue, rename the old
/home directory and make a new empty one just before you
reboot with the changed /etc/fstab.  After you see that the other
partition mounted properly and has the correct contents you can
remove the old renamed copy.

Be sure you have a backup... I'll plug backuppc running nightly
on a desktop PC with a big IDE drive again as the most painless
way to have up to date backups. 

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com