super safe keeping of email data : dedicated partition

[yeehi]

I often end up wiping my whole system and i lose:

my mail: mail, addresses, folders, filters, pgp...
my bookmarks: for opera, the browser i love!!

I have tried to remedy this problem by creating a separate partition during installation for /home.

It helps, but eventually i banjax the /home too and make such a mess i need to wipe everything as i don't know how to untangle stuff.

SO, i want to keep the critical files for my mail and browser on a dedicated partition. THat way they should be safe forever!

How do i do this? I have left space on the hdd for a new partition.

[Jman]

On this site (http://newrpms.sunsite.dk/index.php?section=2) is an rpm for a graphical version of the parted partition software.

What besides mounting the partition read only will keep you from blowing the partition away? And if it is read only, the next clean Fedora install might wipe it.

I highly recommend some kind of backup of this kind of information.

[yeehi]

I am v happy to have a moderator helping me! Thank u, August One!

I want the dedicated partition to be read write as i want the file containing the continually updated changes to my address book and the growing contents of my mailbox to be kept upto date in real time.

I think backing up is a good idea. I tried this when the box was redhat 9. I tried to copy paste the /home/yeehi/.mail file to my windows box. The file transfer went but some of the folder contents were not copied over, so that was tough. Maybe coz the partition on the linux box was not vfat. I think therefore that the dedicated partition should be vfat...?

Wow! I really have to lay into this fedora to get it going right for me. :) But i can handle that ;)

[fedetxf]

This does not apply directly to the original poster, but I use mozilla and all I have to backup are the inbox files (2 files per folder I want to keep) and then I recreate my mozilla installation profile (fresh profile) and overwrite those files from the ones I backed up. Easy and bulletproof.

[Jman]

Thank you for your confidence.

Whatever you do, modifying data partitions is tricky business. And when you reinstall or upgrade, be very cautious you aren't formatting your partition. With luck the upgrade will be painless with no parititioning.

I don't have much personal experience with resizing Linux partitions, however.