Using 2 disks, one for system, one for user data?

Aurora
1

The laptop I’m installing Aurora on has 2 disks, a 1 TB HDD, and a 256GB SSD.
I thought I’d install the system on the SSD for speed and put user data on the HDD.
Is this a good approach?

Setting this up during install doesn’t seem to be possible, but what’s the advised way to do it? Is it ok to simply set up the paritions and edit the system’s fstab? Or is there a better way?

Thanks in advance for your help

2

Many of us need to edit /etc/fstab for special use cases like using ZFS instead of btrfs, mounting NFS volumes, etc. The understanding is that these types of customizations are definitely allowed (i.e., there is special handling built-in for the R/W /etc dir) but not supported directly by Universal Blue.

I wrote an article summarizing the docs for ostree handling of /etc and /var. These docs helped me gain a better understanding of this part of the atomic desktop concept.

Enjoy.

1 Like
3

I think it is a good idea to put the system on the SSD and user data on the HDD

In such a case I would

  • install the system on the SSD and ignoring the second disk

  • later when the newly system is up I would

  • a) add the second disk in /etc/fstab (under the assumption that it has a file system already)

  • b) then test with sudo mount -a and sudo systemctl daemon-reload

  • If sudo mount -a did mount the new disk then you may reboot

2 Likes
4

Or one can simply set the second disk as /var/home during installation if using BTRFS, I have this same config on two different machines, and they both work fine.

1 Like
5

Thanks all for the answers. I didn’t find the way to achieve it in the installation process (I installed before I posted :wink: ) , so I’ll do it manually. I mount the partition under /var/data and put symlinks ~/Documents/, ~/Videos etc to that partition so that ~/.config and ~/.cache are still on the SSD.

6

A note for future readers of this thread: I needed to give the rights to the LibreOffice flatpak to write files to /var/data/$USER/. I did it like this:

sudo flatpak override org.libreoffice.LibreOffice --filesystem=/var/data/$USER
1 Like
7

I would only move your /Documents, /Pictures folders to a separate drive. Or just a separate btrfs subvolume. Easy to snapshot to other locations.

Those two contain precious data. All other folders especially app related folders can be recreated/configured.