Thanks for the photo of the server build! I’ve not personally partitioned a disk in this manner, but you’re welcome to try. It would be strongly recommended to make a full bootable backup first (with the current single-partition configuration). If the experiment works, please share it with us!
There are upsides and downsides to splitting the home folder from the system folder:
- Upsides:
- Allows us to backup just the system folder onto relatively cheap 128GB or 256GB SSDs.
- Total time for backup is also reduced, so it’s more convenient to make more frequent backups.
- We can allocate a bigger SSD to our home folder. This is especially important if we’re saving large video files or managing large photo collections (especially RAW files).
- Downsides:
- Someone reported that some third party applications (perhaps some Adobe applications) may not work properly when the home folder is split from the system folder, although I have not independently verified this claim.
- All of the apps I use have no problem with a split home folder.
Time Machine backups can and should be used alongside full backups. Reason:
- If we make a full backup every week or two weeks, for example, then any in-between changes made to your data files will be lost.
- But Time Machine backups up your files on a much more regularly basis and keeps track of all of the intermediate versions of a file. So you can retrieve any past version of a file.
- Time Machine is therefore ideally suited for the home folder that contains your documents.