Windows 11 and Windows 10 were recently updated with “Windows Backup”, which has now become a system app. While the feature initially appeared as “optional” or something that could be easily dismissed, Microsoft is slowly getting aggressive with its new OneDrive backup campaign on Windows 11.
Windows 11’s “Windows Backup” uses OneDrive to back up many of the things that are important to you. This may include your credentials, settings, pictures, documents, videos, files, themes, or even audio settings. Microsoft wants the Windows Backup app to become the ultimate backup tool, but there’s a catch.
Windows Backup does not support offline backups and requires a OneDrive plan. By default, OneDrive offers 5GB of free storage, which is why some users do not want to backup their PC. But is that going to stop Microsoft from pestering users? Probably not. In a new server-side update, Windows 11 has started nagging users to try the Backup tool.
Good writeup.
But why separate /home?
I get that it makes it easy to just grab the home partition in full, but grabbing just your own home folder isn’t any more difficult than grabbing a home partition.
And it makes it really fucking annoying to manage storage between / and /home. You have to pick how much disk space you want for your own things and how much you want for installing things, and changing it later is a giant PIA. The one time I did it I kept running out of space on one or the other.
Separate root fs makes it easier for timeshift. Snapshots are a different beast from backups.
Also makes it easy to install another distro and pick up where you left off with the old home.
If you alocate 50-60 GB for system it should be ok. Things like Flatpak or Steam can put their files in home.
How? I use timeshift. I don’t see what you mean.
Sure, but how often do you distrohop? Not worth the trouble to have to potentielly mess with partitions during everyday use.
When I do reinstall, I’ve just copied my home folder over to a secondary drive, then back again.
That’s the entire boot drive on some of my machines. Not to mention that I have gone well beyond that for root on some systems. You just can’t know the numbers in advance, and when you want to just use a system for something, it’s really annoying to have extra steps.
Making home a separate partition makes it really hard to use the full capacity of the drive, should you need to. Which people do need to do sometimes, even if only temporarily.
Doing this might make sense if you have terabytes of storage to throw around, enough to never fill any of your volumes. It has benefits, but not enough to make it good advice across the board, which is why I question it.
I don’t see real advantages for partitioning this way that outweigh the negatives - for desktop usage. For servers having separate home (and/or other dirs) partitions is great, as user fluff won’t kill the ability tor ‘more important processes’ to store stuff. If everything is kept on a single partition, the user is essentially able to DoS the system by filling up space.