[SOLVED] Binding" questions

[gold_finger]

1) If I bind a home folder to a folder in the new partition folder - and I save a document (for example) is it physically saved only on the new partition (in Document folder), or on the new partition and in the home folder ("Documents" in home in this example)?


As I understood it (or thought I did) initially, it would be saved on the new partition only, but with the binding, it would appear in my home folder "documents" as if it were actually there, but I saw something that made me question that and the project would be less helpful if that is the case.

Your understanding is correct.

When binding the Documents folder on data partition to the Documents folder in your Home, things end up physically located on the data partition.  The Documents folder in Home only serves as a mount point -- a place in the file system where the Documents folder on the data partition gets directly accessed from.  A symlink performs a similar function, except instead of providing direct access to the folder, it's a link pointing to the desired folder on the data partition.  They are just two different ways to accomplish same thing.

If you wanted to see that nothing is actually being saved under Home, you could temporarily disable auto-mounting of your data partition and then reboot computer.  You'd then see the same folders in your Home, but there would be nothing in them.  You could also confirm that everything is on the data partition by using your file manager (Thunar) to navigate to the main mount point of the data partition and look in the Documents folder there.  Eg.  If you used mount point in the tutorial, just navigate to "/mnt/DATA/Documents" (instead of /home/chris/Documents) and you'll see all of your files there.  Long story short -- binding IS doing what you intended for it to do.

2) So far, I am able to bind my LL folders to the folders in the new partition but I am clueless about how I might do this in my Windows 7 O/S.  Or maybe this is unnecessary and I can/should just navigate documents/downloads/etc. to be saved in the new (ntfs) partition?

Unfortunately, I can't answer this because I've never tried it and haven't really used Windows more than once or twice a year for the last five years.  Don't know if "binding" as done in Linux is possible or not, but I'm sure you could create symlinks to the data partition.  If noone here can answer exactly how that's done, maybe try asking on the Windows 7 Forum.  I'm pretty sure that symlinks can be done easily.