- 04 Jan, 2026 *
Taking times for backup is such a waste of time. In this post, I want to share you how to create an portable home, and make an Windows-friendly data partition, which is great for you who still dualbooting with Windows.
Using NTFS partiton just for data
Yes, Linux is completely supporting NTFS. But if you mount NTFS partition as /home, you will get annoyed by Unix permission, because it’s explicitly only working in Linux filesystems like ext4, btrfs, etc. And I almost having an big headache after reinstalling and reuse the NTFS partition as /home, because all my datas on it. My current workaround is:
- Move my Documents, Music, Pictures, ... to the root of the partition from the
usernamefolder.1 - Mount this NTFS partition as
/data1….
- 04 Jan, 2026 *
Taking times for backup is such a waste of time. In this post, I want to share you how to create an portable home, and make an Windows-friendly data partition, which is great for you who still dualbooting with Windows.
Using NTFS partiton just for data
Yes, Linux is completely supporting NTFS. But if you mount NTFS partition as /home, you will get annoyed by Unix permission, because it’s explicitly only working in Linux filesystems like ext4, btrfs, etc. And I almost having an big headache after reinstalling and reuse the NTFS partition as /home, because all my datas on it. My current workaround is:
- Move my Documents, Music, Pictures, ... to the root of the partition from the
usernamefolder.1 - Mount this NTFS partition as
/data - After install, I can simply symlinking the folders from
/datato~/.
# Delete the current /home directories
rm -r ~/Documents ~/Downloads ~/Videos ~/Pictures ~/Music ~/Public ~/Templates
ln -sfn /data/Documents ~/Documents
ln -sfn /data/Downloads ~/Downloads
ln -sfn /data/Videos ~/Videos
ln -sfn /data/Pictures ~/Pictures
ln -sfn /data/Music ~/Music
ln -sfn /data/Public ~/Public
ln -sfn /data/Templates ~/Templates
Spent a bit for /home partition
You wouldn’t need to spend so much for the /home partition, because the data is already handled in another NTFS partition, it is just for some configurations, and not taking so much space. In my case, It’s just only spend like 1.1GB. So, I recommend you to just giving an 10-20GB, in case you’re not using it to store your data.
My current disk worklow is like this2:
NAME FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sda
├─sda1
├─sda2 ntfs Data M2 3816C82C16C7E8C8 122.2G 61% /data
├─sda3 btrfs 1598c024-f8bc-4547-afaa-2a052b450366 47.5G 2% /home
├─sda4 vfat FAT32 43B7-34CB 298.7M 0% /boot/efi
└─sda5 btrfs b61ddcb1-93b5-44db-b097-e9347fd5d118 90.6G 16% /var/cache
/var/log
/var/tmp
/srv
/root
/
2/100 #100DaysToOffload
Because I use this partition as /home before↩
1.
Ignore the sda1, it’s just something like "Microsoft reserved partition". And I spend way too much for /home, lol.↩