What considerations before I remap some "default" home folders?

Support & Help Requests
1

So my main drive is small, but I have a larger secondary hard drive in this box.

I want to move some of my home folders to the larger drive, but I have a couple of concerns:

  1. Windows gets… ornery if you try and do this. Are these folders in Ubuntu special, or are they just a series of folders created by default where the devs even prettified them with icons — but otherwise unspecial? Or are they special somewhere to some part of the system that will get ornery at me if I move them?

edit: I’m not running Windows, I’m just an oldschool Windows geek and asking if there’s anything special about these folder to Ubuntu in the same way that Windows has “special” folders. Or do distros just say “Let’s create these folders and make them pretty to help the user”? But I know some programs expect ~/Documents to exist. So if I was answering my own question, I’d mention that. Wondering what other concerns there might be. Although I suppose if I create a link to the folder elsewhere… that might do the trick?

  1. When I first boot, the secondary drive doesn’t mount… or… that might not be right. It appears in the “Places” dropdown on the MATE panel, but only becomes available once I click that. I’ve been afraid to play in fuse fstab¹ to try and make it work on boot. I’ve noticed that changing Chrome to download to a folder on this drive causes it to prompt me for a download location - I can navigate to the secondary drive and it mounts (or whatever it’s doing to make it available)… but… will that be a concern for me if I’m trying to move more folders over?

¹ fstab, not fuse. d’oh.

2

I create a separate data partition on my second drive, and create bookmarks to the folders there. I save and store all my important files to the second disk. Advantages are when I upgrade the OS, all my documents are left untouched on the second drive, and since I dual boot, the same documents can be accessed from the other OS as well. Especially useful for common files like music and video.

My home folder is mostly empty and holds just the configuration files that are created there, which I leave alone, and non-permanent file storage.

Some users make symbolic links from the home folder to the other drive. That is another way.

Are you mounting the secondary drive partition in fstab? Your second drive should be mounted by fstab on startup. Then it is immediately available.

3

I use a NAS for my data storage and just leave /home alone for application configs. Caveat - I’ve yet to add my NAS to /etc/fstab. All my data is available to a MAC, 2 Windows 7 pcs, and 2 linux pcs; the MAC and 1 win and linux access the NAS via my in home wifi.

I suspect that if you add your data drive to fstab it would be mounted automatically every boot as pointed out by @Spyder.
You might get some insight from a thread I started about /etc/fstab … here’s an answer from @DaveB

Okay, here goes…

For your set-up (dual booting GNU/Linux / Windows), most recognised
solution for a (non-OS) shared NTFS partition is as follows…

UUID=**** /media/Storage ntfs uid=1000,gid=1000,dmask=027,fmask=137,windows_names 0 2

replacing “****” with relevant NTFS partition UUID stringreplace “Storage” with preferred name (Tip: no spaces allowed)

Explanation of other settings:

/media - For drives you wish to show/mnt - For drives you wish to hideuid=1000 - User ID (normally 1000) gid=1000 - Group ID (normally 1000) dmask=027 - Directory permissions using octal numbers fmask=137 - File permissions using octal numbers windows_names - Only allow Windows compatible names0 0 (seen below) and 0 2 - Pass numbers, 0 0 = do not check, 0 1 =
check this partition first (used for the OS), 0 2 = check this partition
next

Here’s another example to easily hide a Windows OS NTFS partition:

UUID=**** /mnt/Windows ntfs noauto 0 0

replacing “****” with relevant NTFS partition UUID string

I recommend hiding a Windows OS partition so damage/boot issues will
not occur if Windows OS is using fast-boot. Doing so also prevents any
mistakes such as accidental system file deletion.

Tip: There’s no need to create /mnt or /media directories first, /mnt
directories are hidden anyway, /media directories are automatically
created upon partition mounting, or after system restart.

PS: It’s okay to use either ntfs or ntfs-3g, ntfs symlinks to ntfs-3g

4

The home folders (for things like Documents, Music, Pictures, etc) are not picky at all. I have them on my external data drive, and is a very simple process, following on from @Spyder:

  • So the easiest way to automatically mount the drive is when the system starts. Use Disks (under Accessories) to create the fstab entry for you.

    1. Click the cogs for that partition and choose “Edit Mount Options”.
    2. Uncheck “Automatic Mount Options” and choose “Mount at startup” and any other things you may like (like a display name “Data Drive”)

  1. Now it’s best to check you have the right mount point, or your symbolic links won’t work on next reboot. For instance, mine is /media/Data. You could reboot the system at this point to be sure it’s mounting.

  2. Open your home folder, delete the old folder.

  3. Open your Data drive, create a symbolic link and middle-click drag it over, renaming it.

  4. Repeat for each folder you’re looking to replace. Works for the hidden . files too.

The only possible side effect is that the default “bookmarks” in the File Manager disappear, but you could re-bookmark them if you desire.

It may be a good idea to edit this file if you change the folder names:

/home/<USERNAME>/.config/user-dirs.dirs
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5

When I started exploring partition mounting, I used the Disks approach, but found it creates ugly fstab entries by default.

For example:
Instead of setting a partitions format type, such as ntfs, it defaults to auto.

After experimentation on several systems, found using auto causes great system shut down delays, can be as long as 2-3 times longer than if partition format type is set.

While editing fstab with Pluma (or other text editor) may at first seem daunting, once settings are learned it becomes easier.

Furthermore, for multi-boot systems with two (or more) GNU/Linux OS, any extra user added (fstab) partition entries for one Linux OS can simply be copied and pasted at the end of another Linux OS fstab file.

Using Disks initially appears to simplify the process (don’t get me wrong, I’m all for making things easier! :slight_smile: ), but means users may not be aware of the fstab file, so it becomes necessary to create Disks entries for each Linux OS.

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6

Just another thought I currently keep Documents, Pictures, Music in Dropbox and symbolically link them to their counterparts in my home directory. I have on one machine have them mounted in fstab using a bind mount. It works pretty well, although I’ve found that linking files from the binded mounts causes issues.