Moving home/user directory to another drive?

I'm installing a SSD and to save space I want to move my user folder to another drive, is there a way to do that?

Solution 1:

From Terminal type this:

sudo mkdir /mnt/tmp
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp

which will allow you to temporarily mount the new partition, assuming /sdb1 as new partition for HOME.

sudo rsync -avx /home/ /mnt/tmp

This will copy HOME to new location.

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /home

This will mount the new partition as HOME and make sure all data is present.

sudo umount /home  

This will unmount the new partion.

rm -rf /home/*  

This deletes the old HOME.

To make HOME permanent you need to know the UUID of the new partition for the fstab entry. you can get that by giving command:

sudo blkid

Note down the UUID and use the same to change fstab .

sudo nano /etc/fstab   

Now add the following at the end.

UUID=<noted number from above>    /home    ext4    defaults   0  2

NOTE: You need to select the exact file system that was formatted (for example ext4 as chosen here).

Now you can restart your computer to see the new HOME.