Having separate partition for /home?

[makleod]

I recently purchased my first Mac (MBP2010 13 inch). I have been using Linux for the past five years or so and have always had a separate partition for my /home directory. I recently used the Disk Utility to do the same to my Mac. So now I have a 100GB root partition and a 650GB /home partition (/users). I'm thinking this may not really be necessary. My questions:

1. Is this really necessary?

2. I haven't had any issues yet, but will I eventually get symlink issues or anything like that?

3. How does time machine differentiate the two different partitions when it backs up? Will I be able to (in the case of data loss) have time machine figure out the two partition scheme?

I'm thinking of maybe just reverting to the original setup. Advice would be appreciated.

 

[satcomer]

1. No it isn't necessary. A Mac user should only partition their hard drive is for a Boot Camp partition.Now if you have some externals you can make good use of them. You can move your iTunes Library by the instruction from Apple here. Plus you can also move your iPhoto Library.

2. How about using Aliases instead.

3. Time Machine just needs the hard drive/partition that needs to be mounted in OS X. Time Machine REQUIRES that a Time Machine drive needs to be formatted in Mac OS Extended (HFS+). It really doesn't care it if it is a partition or a whole drive. It is smart thought that the Time Machine drive needs to be larger than the startup drive time Machine is backing up.

Now OS X is NOT like Windows! You can Boot OS X from an external as long as it is a bootable clone. The free Carbon Copy Cloner is very good at making/scheduling clones. It is really worth a download. Also you can get other Mac software from MacUpdate that wll not appear in the Mac App store.

Lastly bookmark the site MacOSXHints. This site has had some really rad hints/hacks to OS X over the years and is very search able. Also bookmark Accelerate Your Macintosh and MacWindows - for integrating to Windows networks.