I Was Right Again About My Linux Home Directory

Key Takeaways

My plan for last Saturday was boot up my system, start up Steam, start up Path of Exile, and give myself a seizure. Instead, it looked a little bit like this. Now, the time remaining there is a lie. Didn't take that long. Instead, it was about 4 and 1/2 hours. Now, you might be wondering, what is this tool? And if you don't recognize it, I am happy for you because that means you probably haven't had to use it. So that was a tool known as part clone. I was using it as part of another tool called clonezilla. This can do many things with your data. But what I was using it for was taking data from one drive and then cloning it over to another drive. And next you might ask is why were you doing that? Well, I had just bought a new drive. And again, why would you have bought a new drive, you might ask? Well, I booted my system and everything was fine. But I noticed that some things were weird. My config file for Toffee was gone. Toffee is the launcher I use. It's kind of like Dmenu. It was gone. It was running as default. And that was strange. I went to the config file and it was marked as read only and said I didn't have permission to access it. Odd. So I rebooted my system. And then I saw a screen that looked like this. This isn't my picture or the user having the same problem as I had, but it's basically the same error message. Failed to mount home. Mine also said failed to mount home/brody/video backup and home/brody/games because those depend on a folder that is present within the home directory. So if home is not mounted then anything that depends on home being mounted also cannot be mounted. Thankfully I had seen this problem before. Sadly I had seen the problem before and understood what the problem was. So, I whipped out a tool known as FSCK and ran a disc cleanup on my home petition because I was dealing with some kind of partition corruption. Thankfully, thankfully nothing of note was lost this time because I have had this same problem happen in the past. Thankfully, it was just a couple of config files for unused applications. It was some random cache files and then obviously the toffee config but that was present within the git repo for my dot file. So all I did is just reverted the file being deleted and now the file is back. After doing the petition cleanup everything seemed to be fine. I could mount home. I could do everything I needed to do. It seemed like everything was fine. I know that everything is not fine though. I know I am dealing with a ticking time bomb because I have left it in this state with another drive in the past and I was like, "Oh, I cleaned it up. It's fine now." And then a few weeks later I had to do the same thing and then a few weeks later I had to do the same thing and eventually the same thing didn't work. And now I had some problems. And like that time, this wasn't after a power outage or a bad shutdown or things that you could logically expect would lead to a corruption problem. It just randomly happened. So most likely, like the previous time as well, the drive was beginning to fail. This is now two Seagate Barracuda drives that have failed on me. I zipped down to the PC store. I bought myself a drive. I played some Mega Bonk on the Steam Deck and I waited for all of the data from my old drive to transfer to the new one. Whilst this day was complete waste and a complete write-off, there is one thing I am happy, you know, we'll go with happy. I'm happy that I did in the past that I think everybody should do and I would encourage everybody to do the exact same at a bare minimum. Always have your home on a separate petition from the root. If possible, even go and put it on a completely separate drive. Obviously, in laptops may not be possible in mini PCs if you don't have the money to buy another drive, all this good stuff. But if you're in a situation where you can have a separate drive for your home, I would highly highly recommend it. I would have been able to load the kernel because the boot petition basically needs to be separated. But if I had a combined home and root, that's as far as I would have gone. I wouldn't have seen that systemd error. I wouldn't have been able to fix it with fsk. I wouldn't have been able to do a lot of these things that, you know, I needed to do to be able to fix the problem that was going on. Now, I could have fixed it through the use of an Arch Linux ISO, you know, trying to mount the drive on that and do all that good stuff, but I was able to fix it on my system and see a proper error message of what was going on without needing to jump through a bunch of extra steps. And if I did need to jump through those steps, I probably would have spent a bunch more time trying to work out what the problem actually was, how to address the problem, because I probably wouldn't have gotten a good error message, and I would just be confused about what the hell is going on. Thank you. Thank you, SystemD, for actually giving me a really good error message about which partition could not be mounted, which drive was having problems. right at the top of the screen. I was like, "Hey, this Yuyu ID, there's issues." And then it like listed out everything that was a problem under that. I knew exactly what was going on because of that. And yeah, I could have worked it out without that. I could have, you know, done the whole Linux ISO thing, whether it be Arch or Abuntu, doesn't really matter as long as you have tools to, you know, fix your drive. But I was also on a bit of a time limit because I had a podcast scheduled for that day and I kind of needed things to be working before the podcast. Um, I ended up getting it done about an hour before we had to start. So, [laughter] you know, um, yeah, and no one wants to spend even more time than they need to with their system not working trying to work out why the system is not working. So, put yourself in a situation where when something does go wrong, you know, you have as little friction as possible to fix that problem. And think about it logically. If one of the drives in your system is going to fail, which drive is that likely going to be? Because my thought process is it's probably going to be your home. Now, of course, you can have weird hardware faults and shorts and other stuff like that, but under consistent conditions, which most of the time is how your system is going to be, this is usually going to be the case. In a normal configuration, which part of your system are you hitting the most? It's not your boot because you load that on boot and then typically your boot position isn't even being mounted. Nowadays, you don't really use that much swap even if you have a swap petition to begin with. So, probably not that. Your route is where apps live and a lot of like low-level services live and default config files and things like that. So, that's going to be frequently accessed. But where is your cache? Where is your user configs? Where is all the user data that you are constantly going to be reading and writing? All of this lives under your home directory. In the majority of systems, unless you know we're talking about a server, things like that, just like a normal desktop system, the part of your system that's going to be hit the most is whatever is present under that home directory. Basically, the entire time you're running your system, something is being constantly read or written to. Just logically, this makes the most sense. And this is especially true in cases where there's a bit of uh a bit of poor optimization involved. I think of cases like KD reaching effects every single time you did anything in Plasma. Thankfully, this has since been fixed, but it made Plasma 6 when it first came out basically unusable with a mechanical hard drive. And then you have cosmic. Every time you change a setting, it would immediately go and apply that setting. And this has been mostly dealt with now, but it also cause things to run incredibly slowly if you're running a mechanical hard drive because there wasn't a save button. So any tiny tweak and if there was a slider, every notch on the slider would cause things to constantly be changed. Now thankfully a lot of normal distros out there do make this separation for you. However, if you're the kind of person using something like an Arch Linux, if we look at the example petitioning table right here, we have a boot or EFI swap and then root or in here swap and then root or swap and then root. It's been like this for a long time. Um, I know why it's like this. This is like the the simplest way to configure things. It's not like the most optimal, but it does work, right? Like there's nothing that's going to stop your system from functioning if you just have a swap, root, and boot. You don't even need the swap. You can just get rid of that one and do other things for the swap. But boot and root. But I don't think this is the most optimal way to set up your system. And why is it doing that? I'm trying to highlight. I think having that separate home as well is just generally a good change. Same thing on Gen Two as well. Their examples somewhere right here. Yeah. No, where is it? Here. Here it is. Probably should have checked beforehand. You have your EFI, your boot, you have your swap, and you have your route. They're using XFS here. Okay, I didn't. Sure, whatever. Um, I do think it would be good to mention, hey, maybe you should also have a separate home as well. I understand why they don't, but I do think that if you are setting up your own system, consider having a home petition. So, if you wind up when you wind up in a situation like I did, it's a little bit easier to fix it than if everything is just merged together. So, this has been a PSA. before something goes wrong with your root petition because of what you've been doing in your home, separate it out. Contain the damage for when the inevitable is going to happen. So, it's just a bit easier to deal with. There's plenty of other reasons to do so, and I've made videos on this in the past, but I still stand by what I said. Just make your life a bit easier. And if you can have a separate drive, that's going to make things easier as well. Especially if you ever want to go and make your home bigger. You just have a whole separate drive for it. Expand it to the end and now you're good. And of course, if there's any reasons why you might want to have certain other data in other partitions, like I have my games on a separate drive, I have a video backup on a separate drive, things like that. Of course, more complex setups are going to be more complex setups, but at least for basics, I think having a boot swap if you want one route, and then a separate home is usually going to serve you well. But let me know your thoughts down below. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Do you think it's a waste of time? I'd love to know. If you like the video, go like the video. Go subscribe as well. And if you want to become one of these amazing people over here, check out the Patreon subscribes deliberate link in the description down below. That's going to be it for me and I never want to deal with this problem again, but I know it's going to happen. And I don't accept