My new way of sharing my data between distros

[elija]

What I used to do was create a separate home partition and use that. Due to some really nasty conflicts with different versions of software and their configuration files I decided that I needed to use a different user name for each distro on the same home partition.

It occurred to me that it would be a pain to remember which user for which distro and that it wouldn't share my data at all!

This is what I came up with - I have enough memory that I don't need a swap partition, you may need one, if you do I would say no more that 1GB.

1 x 500GB partition formatted to ext3 (for my data).

Per Distro
1x 25GB partition formatted to ext3 for the install - including the home directory

In my home directory I create a Documents directory (if it is not already there) and I mount my data partition using fstab

/dev/sda1 /home/elija/Documents  ext3  defaults,rw,relatime

This seems to work flawlessly and has the following advantages

1. Each distro has it's own home directory which holds it's configuration data
2. My data is available no matter what I boot to.
3. If I install a new version, I can safely lose the home directory as my data isn't there.

Are there any problems that I haven't spotted yet?

[Freston]

Yeah, that is also possible. I can't comment on the size (25GB), but I know of the troubles of sharing a home dir between distro's.

You know what I did? I made a dir called /home/share and put symlinks to that dir from each account and between distro's. That allows me to keep /home under a separate partition while still able to share data (but not settings) between accounts.

Due to me being lazy I didn't go as far as to share for example Firefox settings and extensions between accounts and such, but I guess with a little UID voodoo and proper umask settings, this should be doable. In theory. I think.


That reminds me though, do you use separate UID's for all your accounts? Or just use the defaults? You don't need to answer this here, but it is something to keep in mind as properly setup UID's can be a great security benefit specially when it comes to networking and sharing between accounts. It may also be a hindrance, depending on how well you thought it out, and how many mistakes you (I?? ) made during install.


But I've heard before that people don't use their home dir for their data, only for settings and configs. It's supposed to be safer, or easier to maintain and clean up at least. I can see how that would work. So I think it's not a bad idea to keep your settings&&configs separate from your data.
It may not mean much difference whether you use a symlink (like me) or a mountpoint (like you). Only when you come to reinstall, you loose all your settings. But then, that's nothing a good backup wont solve.