Installing with separate /home partition & bug #150670

[Michel Salim]

2009/2/28 Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com>:
> On Thu, 2009-02-26 at 17:55 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
>> >From doing some Googling, it seems Ubuntu have come up with an
>> alternative approach, which is for the installer not to wipe out /home
>> on an existing install...
>>
>> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2008-May/004210.html
>
> You'd also need to not wipe out user accounts. But this seems like a
> worthwhile feature. Windows can do something like it. (There you just
> have to wipe out c:\windows...)
>
> And now we start bikeshedding about implementation. Do we
> whitelist /home and /etc/passwd|group and wipe out everything else, or
> do we nuke a whitelist of known system directories? The latter is
> probably safer. You probably want to save /usr/local too. What if users
> have crap in /var/www/, or MySQL databases...
>
Or even safer -- the OS X "Archive and Install" approach, where this
whitelist is moved into, e.g. /previous

There's a problem with lack of space, of course, and that /var in
particular might be on a separate partition. So maybe for each
whitelist entry that is mounted on its own partition, recursively do
the backup, so if we are saving /var/foo and /var/bar, they end up in
/var/previous/foo and /var/previous/bar if /var is mounted separately.

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