Here is a link to a nice tutorial to rectify something most new users overlook or don’t understand.

Move /home to its own partition

A word of caution with this one: there’s an error in the syntax which is corrected by one of the commenters. As another commenter says,

Keep in mind, this is somewhat risky… messing with fstab can be dangerous, so double check for typos

as in

$sudo mount /dev/hda5 /ment/newhome

“ment” should read “mnt”

In fact the comments are almost as informative as the tutorial.

It would be nice if the option to have your home folder on its own partition was either the default or highlighted in fresh installs. It would save so much confusion.