Is it okay to symlink 'Desktop' to a separate DATA partition?

[m654321]

I posted this question (the title of this thread) fairly recently on goldfinger's 2014 tutorial, which described symlinking data folders (Documents, Downloads, Music, etc) to a separate data partition.

However the question remained unanswered, so am now posting it here as a separate thread in the hope that it will be picked up by someone. Goldfinger's  tutorial can be seen at: https://www.freecinema2022.gq/forums/tutor...partition/   

Question ...
I notice that goldfinger avoided symlinking the 'Desktop' - was there a reason for this?


Is it okay to symlink the Desktop to a separate data partition as done with the other data folders as mentioned above. 


I often download large amounts of data from the internet (e.g. films) and so need quite a large 'Desktop'. The reasoning is if I symlink 'Desktop' to a separate data partition, then I could keep the size of my /home partition to a minimum ...


Many thanks in advance for your help & advice ...
Mike

[supergamer]

Here is what I did with a similar situation and using a different system. I created a folder on the extra storage and linked it to the desktop or I linked it to a folder inside of a folder. My exact setup was I had a Movies folder linked in the downloads folder just to keep my desktop clean looking. In reality there should not be an issue but I would link another folder but it's really your choice on how you setup your system. Now one thing to remember with a set up like this, make sure you backup your extra storage as eventually it will fail. Just throwing in my 2 cents and I hope it helps you. Now to explain my setup alittle more, I had a 500GB harddrive with a 16GB primary partition formatted as Fat32 and booted my system live everytime. I had personal folders linked for each of my family members so we could save files across reboots then had an extra internal 1 terabyte drive for storage of home movies linked to my download folder.

[m654321]

Now one thing to remember with a set up like this, make sure you backup your extra storage as eventually it will fail.

Thanks for your reply, supergamer.
I'm certainly with you on that one - always have two backups of my personal data drive (sometimes 3), and a weekly cloned back up of my OS drive (using 'dd' command), which preserves all the symlinks, etc. I had a bad experience back in 2002, where I lost 3 years of family photos when my Windows OS Toshiba laptop at the time crashed & was unable to retrieve the files - I learnt my lesson ! 

Heard a really sobering story on the radio the other day, where a local radio station's computer crashed and they lost half of all their music and commercials - it took them 6 months to recover most of it!  For the little bit of time it takes to backup, it's more than worth it ...

Thanks for your other details about your system.  One thing I notice is there doesn't seem to be just one right way with Linux - lots of folk have different ways of doing things.

However, I'm still curious to know what reason goldfinger has for not symlinking  /home/username/Desktop to the separate data drive in his tutorial - I'll get an answer to that eventually (hopefully) ....