Separating Puppy's system files from user files....

[basslord1124]

I just had a little bit of a brainstorm on this so I am looking for a little bit of advice/recommendations before I commit to this.

Since the release cycle of Puppy is pretty quick, I am starting to find it just a tad annoying to backup my files to the my server before installing a newer version of Puppy (I should mention I do not have a CD/DVD Burner on my laptop). I am not against backups or anything, but I think a way to keep my system more in tact when I do upgrades would be nice. Then the lightbulb went off for me to do a partitioning scheme where I could place my user files separately from the system files. But that got me wondering if there was a way to put the root folders of my-documents and maybe a few other directories onto another hard drive partition. I am not sure if something like this could be done since by default it groups it in with the root directory. I suppose I could create an fstab entry to a completely different mount point on the other partition.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

[craftybytes]

Sometime back I had a similar problem with the "kernel' files for Puppy - where to put them - someone (cannot remember who) suggested that I could put them on a separate partition and then "symlink" to them from a 'same-named-directory' in Puppy (i.e.. symlink from /usr/src/linux - in puppy - to /mnt/hdb3/linux-2.6.18.1 - on partition /hdb3 )..

Maybe you could try this method to 'separate' those folders you want from the main puppy and still get access to them..

HTH..

[GuestToo]

yes

you could mount, say hda7 when Puppy boots, by putting something like this in /etc/rc.d/rc.local:

e2fsck -p /dev/hda7
mount -t ext3 /dev/hda7 /mnt/hda7

copy /root/my-documents to /mnt/hda7
rename or delete /root/my-documents
make a symlink from /mnt/hda7/my-documents to /root/my-documents ... you could drag a link using Rox, or you could type this:

ln -snf /mnt/hda7/my-documents /root/my-documents

now, when Puppy boots, /root/my-documents automatically will be a folder on /mnt/hda7 (which might be an 80 gig partition, for example)

you can do the same thing with other folders, like my-applications and my-roxapps

then when you upgrade Puppy, if you use a new clean pup_save file, you can restore everything in your old my-documents, my-applications, and my-roxapps folders by making a few symlinks

[rarsa]

I've been recomending this kind of configuration for quite sometime. It works for me very well since the early days ( I think the first time I did it was in 1.06)

In computers where puppy is the only file system or where I can create an ext2 or ext3 partition. I just link the /mnt/home where my pup_save file is to /root/data.

In a computer where I must keep it 100% NTFS, I create an aditional filesystem in a file called pupdata and I mount that file to /root/data.

I even keep a "/root/data/downloaded" folder for all the dotpups and dotpets I install so when I start using a new version of Puppy, I start with a clean pup_save file and just apply all the dotpups I regularly use.

[andrei]

Besides upgrading, there is another very good reason NOT to keep my-documents in the pup_save. Suppose that you are working on some document, and suddenly there is a power interruption. You thought, because your editor has auto-save every 5min, that all your lost is last 5 minutes of work.
But in fact you lost up to 35 minutes! Why? Because if your document is in /root/my-documents, then this means that the auto-save was actually saving on pup_rw, and pup_rw is then saved to pup_ro1 (which is pup_save.2fs) only every 30 min.
So, all your work will be lost.

Perhaps I would even suggest that there should be no directory /root/my-documents in the future releases of Puppy, because the user should not be encouraged to keep their work on pup_save.2fs

[Pizzasgood]

For the record, the 30-minute save cycle is only for USB installs, and frugal HD installs to SATA harddrives that don't use PMEDIA=satahd as a boot option.

Also, I set up a small app that will save immediately on command.
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 18&t=11542

I don't disagree with separation though. I'm gradually moving my stuff outside the save-file. Not just because of crash-paranoia, but because it's easier to share between my Puppy installs. At any given time, I might have two to five versions of Puppy set up. If I put my bookmarks file, my wallpapers, and my music outside in the harddrive, I can load them in anything without fiddling. That's especially handy if I was using an encrypted save-file, because those are more troublesome to mount. Now I think about it, I wrote a function that makes mounting encrypted files much simpler. It automatically handles all the losetup stuff. I should turn it into it's own script and upload it. I'll do that later tonight.

Also, I work on some of my homework in Windows (the main reason I have it installed at all). Mounting filesystem images is even more annoying in Windows-land. So I made a small fat32 partition and just keep it there. Then Puppy and Windows can both access it.

You can also get away with symlinking your Firefox bookmarks from Windows into Puppy, so you share the same bookmarks in both OS. You do need to make sure Puppy can write to it though. I still don't trust the whole NTFS thing, and really don't feel like fixing XP if I do break it. It's just so slow and unintuitive to work with Windows. But I did it all the time on my old computer, which used 98SE and FAT32. I could get around it by installing Firefox in my FAT32 partition, but I don't care that much. About all I do in Windows is homework, mainly making sure Visual Studio can compile my programs.

[GeoffS]

Rarsa
Thank you for explaining how to do that with links - now I can tidy my arrangement.
As I have mentioned on other threads, I've kept my data in a separate partition for as long as I can remember - even on another disk sometimes - as far from Windows as possible
Thank you
Geoff