Hello everyone.
i’ve totally reinstalled my system as it was in a bad shape and doing that i’ve lost some data in my Home folder (i thought i did a good backup of it but i was soooo wrong…) Therefore during the reinstall, i’ve created a partition with only my Home folder, the Root partition is separated now. But, in case of i need to reinstall everything, can i keep my Home folder or do i need to wipe it and reset it anyway? I know that it contains various folders such as .var, .config or else that are apps depended. So i don’t know if i can keep it while doing a fresh install of linux in the future.
You can keep your home folder and that is one of the reasons people separate root and home. When you reinstall you only touch root but let home unchanged.
So next time do not wipe the whole disk and retain home.
Thank you very much. That’s exactly what i was hoping for. So cool i won’t lose my home folder with all my settings. Linux is awesome… when we know what we are doing!
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During the next install just designate that home partition to the /home mount point and you should be set.
I’m sure you’ll be doing this but definitely backup first on an external device and unplug it before starting the reinstallation. 
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Yes, but that’s how i got in trouble. I’ve copied my entire home folder on an external HDD, but the .password folder was soooo heavy that i couldn’t do it. I just had my folders but they were all empty. As I am dumb, i thought it was a bug because the home folder was 160 Gb. Actually this was all and only the .password folder. So doing a backup can be tedious on that regard
If you would share with us the details of how you did your backup, many kind members here will help you to have the correct method/command so that your data this doesn’t happen again. Did you use a GUI or CLI?
I did it probably the worst way: copy/paste my home folder on my external HDD with Dolphin (or maybe Krusader, I don’t remember as I have both). I’ve had Timeshift set to back up everything (/root and /home), but I didn’t realize it stopped doing it 1 month ago as my HDD where it’s stored was full after 5 snapshots.
I could retrieve my data from 1 month ago thanks to Timeshift, but that was far from ideal
This is why, for the most part, I only use timeshift as a system backup and not a home folder backup. I use dejadup for my home folder on a dedicated external drive. Copy/paste could work for a single backup but that won’t check file integrity so any corruption during transfer won’t be noticed.
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Thank you for your reply. I’ve never heard of dejadup. I’m going to check this right now.