[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 Nick Moffitt (nick at zork.net):

> Darlene Wallach:
> > 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.

This seems just a little non-responsive to what Darlene said.

She said, in effect, 'I can wipe and install all of the system _but_
/home very cleanly if /home is a separate partition'.  Your replying, in
effect, 'Well, sure, but you can get the same benefit from regular
backups' misses the point that no restore from backup can be as quick,
or as guaranteed to be accurate and complete, as just leaving /home in
place.

Some of that benefit can be gotten from leaving /home on a One Big
Partition and just doing a selective 'rm' from (say) a live CD prior to 
installing the new system, but that's not as clean as a separate
filesystem.