Is it possible to boot without mounting /home?

Posted by Exeleration-G on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Exeleration-G
Published on 2012-04-11T21:56:52Z Indexed on 2012/04/11 23:45 UTC
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I want to backup my /home partition on /dev/sda6 using partclone, a command line utility. To do so, I first have to unmount the partition that I want to backup. Most of the time, this is easy, but /home is used by so many processes that it can't be unmounted without first killing all those processes.

So, the thing I'm looking for is a way to boot Ubuntu, without mounting /home, so I can back up the not-mounted /dev/sda6 partition. Is that possible?

To be clear, it would be nice if this special boot could be 'one-time-only'. So I'm not looking for ways to change /etc/fstab in such way that /dev/sda6 won't be mounted. That's because that would require me to change /etc/fstab twice each time just to make a backup.

I'm aware of the fact that there are other backup solutions available, such as deja-dup. I'd like to use partclone, though.

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