Re: /usr/home vs /home

> In the old days home was typically a separate partition that was
> mounted on /home.  If you didn't have a partition the installer would
> create /usr/home and symlink /home to it.  The root was also typically
> an independent partition, so it made sense not to clutter it up with
> home directories.
         
> Now that the default behavior is to use one big partition, the
> installer defaults to /usr/home + symlink.
         
> I've always liked the more succinct /home and was wondering if there
> is any reason why not to delete the symlink and move home to / to
> mimic the old many partition style?
         
> thanks,
> dave c

My preference is to use the traditional /home, on a separate partition.  That way, user data can be kept safe in the case of a major upgrading or revamping of the system.

This principle is even applicable for MS-Windows, even if the user-data partition is not called "home".

A Linux user can run two or more distributions sharing the same /home with each other, but not the same /home as for FreeBSD because of different file system.

bsdinstall on FreeBSD 9.0-BETA1 changed my /home to a symlink to /usr/home, but I changed it back to my preference.

I read that PC-BSD considers /usr/home to be correct. 

I agree with Martin Sugioarto <martin_at_sugioarto.com> on preparing the disks myself rather than letting the installer do it.  bsdinstall only made things more difficult for partitioning the disk, not allowing enough space, and also bsdinstall's boot partition was nonfunctional for me.

But I don't see any advantage to putting /, /usr, and /var on separate partitions.

Tom