I use rsync to backup my /home directory to an external drive. There’s always a fair bit of new stuff in .cache that I see scroll by (I use rsync -av so the output is verbose).
I have many times restored data from my backup but have never restored the .cache folder or any of its contents. I know it’s not a heavy burden in terms of overhead but I was wondering if I could exclude .cache without worry.
Hi @don.karon ,
It would seem it is quite safe to even remove its contents, as long as nothing is running. It is a scratch file space for browsers, etc…
I wonder if you could make .cache a link to /tmp and get rid of it out of your home
directory?
I do not like the idea of programs having dot files in your home directory.
I cant move the dot files, so what I do is never use the home directory for personal files. I keep all my stuff on another partition which is mounted. I can share that partition between several distros… you cant share home directories, because the dot files clash.
Regards
Neville
Why not?
I successfully moved .mozilla and .thunderbird to another place, and linked to its original position. It worked flawlessly…
I did it in a similar way. I don’t have many distros, only Debian, but I played a bit with different DE’s, and I always had a clean home dir for my users on all systems.
So when I started to experiment with KDE, while my production system had Gnome, I had 2 systems.
As I did not want to mix them, I wanted to start with a clean home for all my users on KDE too…
I had 2 system partitions, one for the “production” system, and one for the testing system. Both mounted the very same home partition (and a partition for my so called “home-ext” 
) upon boot.
The “big” data, such as pictures, documents, etc. are on a separate drive in a layout which resembles the /home, so all users have their own directories with appropriate access rights. This is my home-ext, and is always mounted into /home/home-ext on my systems.
So if a user on the Gnome (that time production) system had username “usera”, the home dir was /home/usera and the documents were a simlink to /home/home-ext/usera/Documents.
On the KDE system the same user had the same name, but the home dir was set to /home/usera.kde to make it independent. But the Documents directory was linked to the same /home/home-ext/usera/Documents to make it the exact same.
And so on…
This resulted independent config files, they still worked on physically the same data set, where it was needed.
This approach worked for me quite well when moving from MATE to Cinnamon, then from Cinnamon to Gnome, and then from Gnome to KDE, all on Debian, but I think this would also work between different distros.
Yes, you are right, you can move them and use links to point to them.
I just found it simpler to move my stuff and let dotfiles have the home directory all to themselves.