I think that is the way I have my hd setup. I have a partition for my system, a swap partition and a home partition
A seperate
DATA partition is different to just having a
Home partition. You move not copy, all of your critical data to the
DATA partition. These are your
Documents,
Pictures,
Music,
Videos,
AudioBooks etc. I also move as
ROOT my:
/usr/share/pixmaps and
/usr/share/peppermint/wallpapers. I find these always useful to preserve. In your
Home folder that has been shrunk to around
20 GB. You really won't need anything larger. You create symlinks to the corresponding folders in your
DATA partition. For the folders moved as
ROOT. You make the symlinks to these folders from the original location of these folder. You can also prior to moving folders to your
DATA partition, format it to
NTFS. This way it can be shared with
Windows on a dual boot system. When it comes to upgrading or moving to a new distro. You can install over your existing OS while leaving the
DATA partition untouched. After the new installation is complete. It's a 10 minute job to edit the
fstab file and create new
symlinks - boom! You're up and running, without the necessity of transferring any folders and files.
Before doing this. It's still very important you do a full backup of your critical data. It's better to be safe than sorry! Are you seeing the huge advantages of having a separate
DATA partition

?