[conspire] How do I determine what I need to keep from my internal hard drive and what is the recommend way to move things to an external hard drive

[Tony Godshall]

>> I want to put /home on a separate partition because I prefer to do a
>> clean install and format the when I install a new release of the Linux
>> distro I install. Putting /home on a separate partition should allow
>> me to do that and not format /home.

> Sure, and as I said that's a valid reason for playing this carve-up
> game.  However, I would argue that it's probably a better policy to keep
> regular backups of /home to the point where you don't fear having to
> scrap it and restore.

There's enough capacity these days to leave a spare partition for
that- you can install your new Linux into a new partition and leave
the original one in place and give yourself a back-out strategy.  I
find 10GB is plenty for a user's root part, 20GB if you run big
programs with big logs.  You can always bind-mount from your big
partition into /var or /usr if it gets too big.  With today's terabyte
drives, leaving a partition free for a future install is no big deal.

Best Regards