Using a folder on an ntfs partition as /home

NTFS is not suitable for an home partition, there are certain type of file system objects (character devices, named pipes, etc) which are required for certain services but are not supported on NTFS.

I'm currently storing the sub-folders of my home (e.g. ~/Documents, ~/Music) on an NTFS filesystem and it appears to be working fine a few months in.

As an example, here's how to host your ~/Documents in your Windows profile folders on an NTFS partition:

1. First make sure you have the NTFS partition set to automount so it's accessible to the system each boot.
2. Move any files that might have accumulated in ~/Documents over to the NTFS partition (e.g. mv ~/Documents/* /mnt/winblows/Users/Username/Documents/).
3. Now delete the ~/Documents directory and create a link to that NTFS folder in its place named Documents (e.g. ln -s mnt/winblows/Users/Username/Documents Documents).

Note: You might have to make ensure your ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs is in sync with the folder locations you've chosen (I did). See this answer for more details. Also, be careful to note the actual locations of your Windows user profile directories as these vary from version to version.

Instead of moving over my home directory, I removed the existing data folders and created links to them in their place.

So in detail what I did was to go to File System, find the directory named host (which in windows was my C:\ in windows as it was where I was hosting ubuntu using Wubi). Then I went to user\myusername\ and created links for my Documents, Music, Pictures folders. I backed up all my data from home\ into these folders. (For instance home\Pictures\* into host\user\myusername\Pictures). I then deleted my home\Pictures folder and then moved the link I created in host\user\myusername\ into my home folder and renamed it to "Picture". The same applies to other folders.