When you read the title of this, you might think I was speaking of my place of residence. No, I am speaking of the single most important folder you need to be backing up – your home folder. For Mac and Linux users, this literally is called the Home directory while for Windows users, this would be Documents and Settingsname or with Vista, /Users/name.

Regardless, the point I am about to make is the same — no matter what other backup tools you might happen to use, be sure to backup this folder the old fashion way as all other more “advanced” methods can and do fail.

Speaking for myself, I take this one step further by using a separate partition for my home directory. This means when my OS goes bad (and yes, Linux is just like any other OS in this way), I can recover with minimum time spent. What might surprise many of you is that I opt out of using mirroring tools such as Ghost, etc. Not because there is anything wrong with this, rather by taking the approach of examining the extra software installed, I can start off clean if I want to. And yes, Vista users can do the same thing with a /Users/name partition too. Well, that is what I am reading anyway. It used to be fairly doable in XP, the same ease surely carried through to the new flagship OS, right?

With Ubuntu Linux, all I need to do is make sure my home partition is big enough that I can spot it. Then during the Live CD install, I can see it listed when I use the advanced partition tool and choose /home for partition with my home data already on it and the root directory is then set to /. It’s actually surprisingly simple and completely idiot proof on a dedicated box.

So why not bother with using mirroring products as clearly, they provide a much faster option? Simple, because what do you do when the restore fails for some reason. Regardless of OS, it happens and when it takes place, life becomes really unpleasant. Think about it — a home folder on a separate partition. If you already use some fancy backup scheme, this is only serving to save your backside should you reach for that external hard drive only to find that the recovery tool you used to back things up with failed for some reason. It happens, nothing is perfect, but a user directory on a separate partition is sure a good place to start when reaching for near perfection for the casual home office! Let’s just say it has yet to fail me.