Re: /home on separate partition & encryption

On 05/16/2011 01:11 AM, Douglas S. Saylor wrote:
I'm starting to think I want to have files a separate /home
partition. I'm trying to sort the +& - of this set-up. Then there's the
question of encryption. Questions: 1) how can this be done without
reinstalling 11.04? 2) with this encryption, is it the "bullet-proof"
type kinda thing even the govt can't crack, or is that something less
than that?



Douglas, just some generalities and without going in detail of encryption which is possible.

o having a separate /home partition in itself is not difficult and is indeed better if it is to be encrypted.
o keeping the same /home for upgrades, say from 11.04 to 11.10 may cause some problems especially with changes from gnome2, unity or gnome3. I can speak only of kde and even with 'minor' kde version changes, there are configuration 'mismatch' and can cause breakdowns.

What I have done - and it is not a suggestion that you follow, just an example for consideration - is that I have a separate partition and I s-linked the files to the /home files of various OS's. That partition is manually included in the fstab of the various OS's. To take a simple example, the .mozilla in that partition is s-linked to same at /home of many OS's. Ditto for .opera, .thunderbird and others.

If system upgrades causes breakdowns, like say .kde, I'll remove the s-link and if by doing so, the system is restored, I'll create a new s-link and carry on.

This separate partition is not a data partition for which I have a very large partition which can easily be mounted or shared by any OS or distro and should (yes, should) have no problem in handling.

Hope this might (yes, might) help you.

Regards - Goh Lip

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