I am facing the following doubt.I installed Arch time ago with a home separate partition. My issue is that I need to reinstall the system and I don't have a backup of my /home. Would a new installation overwrite my home and leave it empty or keep my current files?The question is because theoretically keeping the data is the main purpose of having one I guess, but it happened to me before that left my home partition empty as new (had a back-up before, but not now). In the installation, when specifying the mounting points, I selected home as /home mounting point and deleted the previous data it had.I will appreciate if someone passed through a similar issue and knows for sure a safe way of reinstalling the system, selecting home mounting point in /home partition and managed to keep the old home data intact. Would installing the system with home included in the partition A / and then manually specify in fstab partition B /home mounting point the cleanest/safer way to do it?I finally backed up my data there as is the only real safe thing to do, and I don't feel so comfortable with luck. Anyway my old home partition I will divide it again, will left around 5 GB partition just to have my recovery partition and avoid having to deal with this again. I'm not sure if its correct to ask it here or should I open a new question but my doubt is if I copy *.* from my fresh installation / to my new 5 GB recovery partition, next time I run into a similar situation, I just boot with a live USB and copy *.* from recovery partition to normal / partition and it is restored as brand new, am I right?
/home partition
arch linux;system installation;home
If you have enough space somewhere you can  tar -cvjf home.tar.bz2 /homeAnd if anything goes wrong when you try to do it a more appropriate way you can be sure you'll still have your data. 