Moving home directory to another partition

I'd need to set up ubuntu, but I didn't want to lose my home directory. Everything was in one partition, so I'd lose my home folder with a re-install. I didn't want this, so I moved it into another partition.

The new partition would be the size of my home folder at least, and I found this by running:

cd /home
du -sch $(ls -A)

I didn't have enough space, so I cleared up some space using these instructions. I made sure the free space was equal to m home directory + 50GB. I don't want to be unable to store new files.

I resized (shrunk) the current partition, then created the new partition from the unallocated space. I used gparted live usb for this. It's easy to use the GUI tool to shrink and create new partitions.

Once done, I logged into my original OS as the root user, mounted the new partition and copied over my home folder with:

mount /dev/sdc2 /mnt
cp -rp /home/* /mnt # cp -r --preserve=all /home/* /mnt might be better
mv /home /home.old

I got the uuid for the new partition with blkid, and modified my /etc/fstab to automatically mount this partition on boot as my home directory with:

# home directory mount
UUID=uuid_from_blkid_output         /home           ext4            rw,relatime     0 2

I rebooted my laptop and everything seemed ok.

Lastly, I cleaned out the home.old folder with:

rm -rf /home.old

And now I could safely change my OS without losing my home directory.