Introdution
The purpose of this page is to help migrate the users home folder to another disk, to help separate user files from the core Linux system.
There are a couple of methods for achieving this, the two I have looked are:
1. Change each users home directory field to new path
2. Physically move the /home folder to a new folder.
3. Physically move the /home folder to it's own partition.
I think each has it's own merits. In the end I opted to use method 2.
Method 1: Update user's home folder
Simply issue the command,
sudo usermod --home /mnt/data/home/demo demo
Where demo is the name of the user and /mnt/data/home/demo is the path to the new folder. In this case it is the another disk image mounted at /mnt/data. Please see Add a Disk Image for further information about this.
Method 2: Move the home folder to a new folder
This method physically moves the contents of the /home folder to a new location and creates a symbolic link to that to preserve the /home path.
Make a copy of the existing home folder in the new location, preserving permissions, links, etc.
sudo cp -a -d -p -r /home /mnt/data/
Rename the old home folder.
sudo mv /home /home_old
Make a symbolic link to the new home folder.
sudo ln -s /mnt/data/home /home
Once you are happy it is working you can remove the old home folder.
sudo rm -R /home_old
Method 3: Move the home folder to it's own partition
I have not yet documented this method. So pick method 1 or 2! ;-)
