Score:0

Ubuntu

Question about the home and root directory relationship

William Lin

2/17/24, 3:22 PM

I keep seeing this graph showing up in the Ubuntu community

which leads to my question: From the graph, it seems that /home $\subset$ /, meaning /home is stored under /. However, when I did partition during the installation, I set separate partitions for / and /home. How does the storage system work in this case? Does the /home folder have its own storage place, which is the partition /home, while the rest of the folders in the / are stored in the / partition?

2 + 0

partitioning

dual-boot

20.04

Score:1

Ubuntu

mook765

2/17/24, 3:54 PM

The /home-directory resides in the /-partition. It's the content of the /home-directory which is stored on a separate partition. This partition is then mounted at /home, the /home-directory is used as mountpoint.

All the folders which are light blue coloured in your picture reside in the /-partition, although there contents may reside on a separate partition. A popular example is a boot-partition, a partition mounted at /boot, but the /boot-directory resides in the /-partition.

+ 2

William Lin

2/17/24, 5:25 PM

So the /home-directory is only a "place holder" that resides in the /-partition and points to another partition, is that it? Does /home-partition store all the content of the ~(the ~ appears in the command line)? Are all the contents other than the ones in the /home-directory stored in the /-partition? It seems to me the partition and the file system are not the same ideas, but if we name the partition as "/" and "home", they will be automatically referred to the /-directory and /home-directory, is it correct?

mook765

2/17/24, 6:15 PM

In a way, `/home` is a placeholder, like you wrote, but in fact it is a real directory. Take a look at `/etc/fstab`, in this file we define which partition to mount where. If you use a separate home-partition all it's content is stored in this partition. `~` is not `/home`, it is `/home/user`. Indeed partitions are not the same as filesystems. A partition is just defined diskspace. A partition acts as a container for a filesystem. The filesystem is what gets mounted, but in dayly life we also say the partition gets mounted.

Score:0

Ubuntu

chili555

2/17/24, 3:53 PM

Does the /home folder have its own storage place, which is the partition /home, while the rest of the folders in the / are stored in the / partition?

Yes, exactly. You can get a confirmation with the terminal command:

df -H

You might see something like:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
tmpfs           802M  3.8M  798M   1% /run
/dev/sda1       108G   23G   80G  22% /
tmpfs           4.1G   24M  4.0G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.3M  4.1k  5.3M   1% /run/lock
/dev/sda6       870G  654G  172G  80% /home

In this example, the / partition is on sda1 and the /home partition is sda6.

Within /home, you will have one or more user directories; for example chili so /home/chili. Within /home/chili, you can set any storage directories you want; for example, Photos, Music, Downloads, etc.

All system changes, updates, etc., automatically find and use / on, in my example, sda1, without any user intervention.

+ 2

mook765

2/17/24, 3:55 PM

No, the `/home`-folder always resides in the `/`-partition, no way around. It's the content of `/home` which may be stored on a different partition.

Jos

2/17/24, 4:08 PM

@mook765 That is correct. Even if `/dev/sda6` is not mounted, there is still a directory `/home`, but it's empty.

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