The Problem:

A file server that was receiving my nightly backups had its power supply unit give out when a resistor blew up. Since the old 400MHz Celeron machine wasn’t much more than a glorified external hard drive, I decided that instead of replacing the fried part, a more practical, energy-efficient solution would involve putting its 80GB hard drive into another machine, and backing up my important files to that machine instead.

This solution proved the most promising, as now I would have full access to a relatively current copy all of my Desktop, Documents and Pictures directories on both machines – even if one were switched off – in addition to having a nightly backup of my important data.

The only problem here was that when doing my backups, I wanted to keep my files synchronized between the two computers and I didn’t have room for everything in the /home directory on the Stereo PCs small 20GB hard drive.

The Solution:

Hook up the 80GB drive as a slave and move the /home partition on the Linux machine in the livingroom to the larger hard drive.

When I initially installed Ubuntu on my jukebox PC, I figured I’d put everything in one partition as it was only one, small, 20GB drive anyway. When I decided to add the 80GB backup drive to the system, it became apparent that separating /home from the rest of the system would be a good idea as well.

I didn’t want to reinstall anything, and I didn’t want to lose any personal settings (I had multiple user accounts set up for other family members), so the solution was just to move the /home directory. Only a few steps are actually required to accomplish this, and since the steps in the articles I’ve found on the subject have required a little bit of tweaking, I figured I’d write my own how-to both to help others, and to refresh my own memory should I ever need to do it again.