Re: Home Directory on External Drive

[alphadeltapapa@gmail.com]

Here are some thoughts:

* Use LVM.  It's great, and works well with external USB drives.  It
will detect it on boot, or you can run /etc/init.d/lvm anytime to
redetect newly-connected drives.

* Consider assigning a GUID to the ext3 partition instead of a label.
Labels are certainly simpler, but a GUID is more likely to be unique
(though I'm sure you could come up with a pretty unique but still
simple label...).

* Using LVM and/or $(mount -a) and the right entries in fstab should
get you what you need.  You can mount your drive on top of /home/
whatever, and then when you umount it, you can still log in as that
user without your drive connected in case you need to do something
real quick or don't have your drive handy, just without your personal
data.