Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I think (besides it not protecting against a dead disk or stolen machine)
I agree that there are lots of scenarios that this does not protect from, but in the context of recovering from malware it makes sense.
the problem with your suggestion is that new users who just click through the installer will be faced with only half their disk space being available and then be in a situation where the fix to resolve this is a fairly complicated and potentially dangerous (for a new user) dance of repartitioning to get a full size home dir
I'd make it obvious what the options are on installation, eg two radio buttons on the install, with the first one (selected) "Use 50% of disk for backing up your photos, music, videos and configuration in case of accidental loss or damage" and a second one "I'll sort out my own backups or don't have anything important, give me all my disk space".
Users potentially already get confused by the loss of disk space to swap and /boot. Most never get close to using all their disk space and aside from wondering why half their disk is missing (which can be explained) will never care. Ideally the backup partition would be visible in Places -> Computer, showing how full it is, and opening it would start the backup recovery software. I'm thinking on the fly here, there's probably bad things with what I'm suggesting, but I just like the basic principle that backups are the default not an extra. Off-site backup via Internet, or offline to (eg) USB drive, would be an easy upgrade once the data is at least backed up somewhere.