# /usr/home



## RichardET (Sep 9, 2013)

I am just curious - why does FreeBSD have the /home partition under /usr?  Usually, on other systems, it is just /home, although I realize that Solaris used /export/home.


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## ShelLuser (Sep 9, 2013)

RichardET said:
			
		

> I am just curious - why does FreeBSD have the /home partition under /usr?


There doesn't seem to be a straight answer for that.

In general the theory behind /usr was basically to separate the files which were more aimed at the end user(s) from the binaries which were only of interest for the maintenance of the system. As such programs like fsck, mount or mknod all live in /sbin whereas /usr/sbin contains files such as chroot, cron and portsnap.

And there you immediately see a grey area. Because I can easily come up with arguments why portsnap might be better placed in /sbin. Or take nologin for that matter, even though some of the other shells reside in /bin.

But going back to the original question: my theory would be to separate user data from system data. Also because this approach might better allow you to divide space. You can keep / relatively small and locate most of your storage to /usr where the majority of your data will live (think ports, src, home and maybe even doc).

This is a good read; it seems this has somewhat recently been discussed on the mailing lists.



			
				RichardET said:
			
		

> Usually, on other systems, it is just /home, although I realize that Solaris used /export/home.


Yeah, but Solaris was even more 'arcane' than FreeBSD. Because /export really meant just that. The file system was actually being exported in an NFS like manner while /home was under control from the auto mounter.

The theory behind that one, though very logical in my opinion, was to make sure that it wouldn't matter if you were using local or remote storage; the home directory would always be available under /home.

And it quite matched too, because instead of using /usr/local Solaris mostly relied on /opt.


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## kpa (Sep 9, 2013)

The /home directory does not have to be under /usr at all. You can safely use a ZFS dataset that is not tied to the /usr datasets at all and has the mountpoint set to /home.


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## SirDice (Sep 9, 2013)

RichardET said:
			
		

> I am just curious - why does FreeBSD have the /home partition under /usr?  Usually, on other systems, it is just /home, although I realize that Solaris used /export/home.



I think it's tradition. And as far as I know only Linux has the home directories on /home/. On almost all other systems /home/ is a symlink.


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## J65nko (Sep 9, 2013)

OpenBSD also uses /home. On FreeBSD I always create a separate /home partition.That way I can use dump and restore.


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## SirDice (Sep 9, 2013)

J65nko said:
			
		

> On FreeBSD I always create separate /home partition. That way I can use dump and restore.


Yes, it's good to create a separate filesystem for it. It'll make reinstalling the system somewhat easier too.


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