From: invalid@invalid.invalid

Chris Ahlstrom  writes:
> Richard Kettlewell wrote this post by blinking in Morse code:
>> The Natural Philosopher  writes:
>>> On 24/01/2026 14:15, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>>> The Natural Philosopher  writes:
>>>>> On 23/01/2026 23:33, Nuno Silva wrote:
>>>>>> What's still puzzling me here is that passwd and shadow are under /etc,
>>>>>> so... login should work regardless of /home being mounted or not?
>>>>>
>>>>> Many configurations are stored in /home/username
>>>>>
>>>>> The answer is to have a skelatal /home  populated before you mount the
>>>>> real home volume over it
>>>> Or apply the KISS principle and have /home on the root partition.
>>>
>>> The problem with that is upgrades. You really want /home out of the
>>> way.
>>
>> In-place upgrades don’t normally touch /home. I’ve been doing upgrades
>> for 30Y without isolating /home and never once has that been a problem.
>>
>> If your idea of an upgrade is to delete everything and reinstall from
>> scratch then that might be another matter, but even then, the worst case
>> is you recover /home from backup.
>
> I periodically scp /home/me to another computer or to an external
> drive.
>
> One issue nags me as the years go by... what will happen to all
> that data [photos, code, legal documents] when I croak?
>
> :-(

Well, it won’t be your problem any more...

Mostly, inheritors don’t care about most of the physical stuff they
inherit, once they’ve picked off things that are useful, valuable or
sentimental to them. It gets binned, or gets auctioned off, or goes to a
charity shop (which in turn will dispose of anything it can’t sell). My
parents recognized this and already got rid of most of their junk, which
will make my brother’s and my job a little easier in however many years
time.

There’s an old-school bookshop in Lisbon which quite obviously sources
most of its stock from estate sales. As well as a lot of books that
nobody really wants any more (although my partner usually finds
something she wants there) there’s sheafs of people’s random
artwork. Someone might buy some of it I guess, but it’s not exactly the
work of undiscovered geniuses.

It’s sad to think about, but how else could it be? People have their own
lives to live. Preservation is the exception rather than the norm.

There aren’t really equivalents of even this very limited preservation
for the electronic parts of our estates. I’ve left my successors a note
about where to find legal and financial information but nobody’s likely
to spend much time poking through my photos. The better ones online
anyway, for now. Most likely it’ll all just be lost to time.

It’s not really a new question. My grandfather left a large collection
of stereoscopic slide images of wildflowers - it’s not in electronic
form, but like our hard disks, the value is informational, not physical.
My cousin thought digitizing it would be great idea (and I don’t
disagree), but he also imagined my Mum would do most of the work once
he’d sourced a suitable scanner, which she wasn’t up for, so the project
didn’t get much further. I’m not sure where it is right now.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)