Partially moving /home to a new partition, leaving some content behind

I have a partition and directory structure that looks like:

small partition:
/
    usr
    var
    ... # etc.

large partition:
/home
    shared
        other_stuff
        large_folder
    user_1
        ...
    user_2
        ...

medium partition:
(empty)

The other partitions are too small to hold the large_folder by itself, never mind the rest of /home. Note that shared does not correspond to a user; it's just an ordinary folder I created under /home, mainly so that the large_folder contents would be on the large partition.

Now with the benefit of hindsight (my reasons for creating the empty partition were ill considered, and also considering reasoning given in https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/70700), I want to rearrange things like so:

small partition:
/
    usr
    var
    ... # etc.

large partition:
/large_folder

medium partition:
/home
    shared
        other_stuff
    user_1
        ...
    user_2
        ...

That is: move everything except the large_folder's contents to the medium partition and have the system recognize this as the new home mount point, while promoting the large_folder to the top level of the large partition.

What's the simplest way to do this? Is it possible without scratch space on a separate drive?

posted 21 days ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Karl Knechtel‭

376 reputation 17 7 58 10