Tuukka R

A question for others before I write a more thorough reply:

Wouldn’t it be a good solution to move the directories elsewhere but then symlink them to their default locations? You’ll need to think a bit about file permissions while doing that, but are there any other caveats?

For the asker:
UNIX-like systems such as Linux are intentionally made so that a directory can be on a different hard drive than its parent directory. So, you can have /usr/games, including almost everything on it to be on hard drive #1, but then define that /usr/games/quake should be on hard drive #2. The limitation is, you cannot have different parts of the directory tree on the same hard drive. So, if /usr/games/quake is on its own partition, you cannot have /home/plzgivehugs/artwork/bigfiles on the same partition.

…except, with symlinks you kind of can.

You can of course remedy the risk of corruption by making several compressed files instead of just one. Then you will lose only part of the data in the worst case scenario.