The approach I've followed for many years is to have /home mount on a separate partition from anything else. Then when you do any kind of fresh install or upgra

The approach I've followed for many years is to have /home mount on a separate partition from anything else. Then when you do any kind of fresh install or upgrade, you only have to make sure that partition doesn't get touched (and usually that's the default) and all is well with the world. It would be slightly more work involving parted (or whatever partition manager you prefer) to create a new partition, resize existing partitions, etc., but quite doable (if tedious and time consuming).