Thomas Cameron wrote:
I've actually set up my Linux machines so that they mount /home on an NFS file server in my home office. I can nuke my desktop and reinstall it in less than 10 minutes with a kickstart, and my home directory is unchanged. Makes it a lot easier when I do the inevitable "oops" and screw up my desktop.
Joe Zeff:
If you have /home on its own partition, you don't even need to have it mounted on your file server. Just do a custom partitioning (I presume that you can do that with a kickstart) mounting that partition as /home and not reformatting and Bob's your uncle. I know, as I've been doing that for over two decades.
I always favoured two drives in the box (separate software & data). You could easily unplug a data drive and be very sure that a new install could *never* screw it up.
And back when I had some spares, I favoured unplugging all drives on an old system, installing a new OS onto the spare drive in isolation, then using it *instead* of the old system drive. If the new OS install didn't work, or a new design was a major pain, it was a moment's work to go back to something that had worked.
Brute force and ignorance is a tried and tested method. Trying to be clever with boot menus, and carefully selecting specific partitions while installing, often goes awry. Not to mention the times you come across an installer that only wants to do a full takeover of your install drive and nuke everything that was on it.