Frequent re-installations of operating system due to crashes is always been a problem for many of the linux users, and my case is also the same.... Everytime i start with doing something like trying some new commands or editing some configuration files and finally ends up with an 'OS crash' and a fresh installation thereafter. Now it's been a very usual matter that i may have to install a fresh copy of linux distro probably once in a month. Sometimes the crash may occur due to installation of a new theme (last week editing some theme files manually after it's installation made my 10.04box stand on nails...), sometimes the crash may be the by-product of installation of an incompatible version of application etc...
While fighting with all these crashes and re-installations the major problem is related to backing up of the data and personal files stored in the /home folder. Usually the contents of the /home contains files and directories including apache's root directory, downloads, files received over bluetooth, joomla/html/php projects etc. So it's very important to back up data all the time Ubuntu is reinstalled.
Solution
One of the best solution to avoid this kind of frequent backup-restore problem is separate the /home directory from the root directory during the installation. The advantages of this separation comes in two ways
1. When a crash occurs to the OS the /home directory remains intact because it is a separate disk partition. So on reinstalling after the crash we can map the old /home partition of the crashed one as the /home of the new linux. This makes it possible to access the files as if before the crash occured.
2. It's easy to share the /home folder between any no of linux distributions installed parellely on your machine. During installation of each of the distro, we can select the partition to be shared as its /home. Better keep the filesystem type (eg:- ext4) same while selecting the /home of other distro as it's new /home. This can be useful even with linux distributions of different architecture using similar filesystem types(Ubuntu and fedora can share a common /home if the /home is mounted as ext4).
While fighting with all these crashes and re-installations the major problem is related to backing up of the data and personal files stored in the /home folder. Usually the contents of the /home contains files and directories including apache's root directory, downloads, files received over bluetooth, joomla/html/php projects etc. So it's very important to back up data all the time Ubuntu is reinstalled.
Solution
One of the best solution to avoid this kind of frequent backup-restore problem is separate the /home directory from the root directory during the installation. The advantages of this separation comes in two ways
1. When a crash occurs to the OS the /home directory remains intact because it is a separate disk partition. So on reinstalling after the crash we can map the old /home partition of the crashed one as the /home of the new linux. This makes it possible to access the files as if before the crash occured.
2. It's easy to share the /home folder between any no of linux distributions installed parellely on your machine. During installation of each of the distro, we can select the partition to be shared as its /home. Better keep the filesystem type (eg:- ext4) same while selecting the /home of other distro as it's new /home. This can be useful even with linux distributions of different architecture using similar filesystem types(Ubuntu and fedora can share a common /home if the /home is mounted as ext4).
On the ground...
Select the manual partitioning options
Setting up the root partition
Mounting the /home partition of old linux as /home of new linux. Don't check the format box. If mistaken you may lose all the data due to disk format
