[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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Darlene Wallach (freepalestin at dslextreme.com):

> 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.

Good idea.  Depending on the 'from' and 'to' distros in your migration
of a /home tree, there is a possible small gotcha.  It is not unknown
for some of the 'from' distro's dotfiles and dotfile directories to
cause problems for software in the 'to' distro.

The classic example is GNOME .gconf/, .gconf-2/ (etc.) trees.  At $FIRM
a few years ago, I found that the RHEL4-derived GNOME dotfiles in my
/home/rmoen tree on NFS were causing problems when /home was being
NFS-mounted by other Linux systems.  If memory serves, GNOME had not
bothered to ensure that its dotfiles were backwards-compatible.

In theory, that situation would not arise with a _new_ release of the
same Linux distro you've been using -- but bear in mind the general rule
of thumb that your dotfiles can have migration problems.