I’ve always preferred not to have my data files on the same partition as my system files and often I have used a separate /home partition for this. This has a huge downside though. As your home folder is also used by the system to hold non global setting files, you risk making a mess of settings when you have different system installations sharing the same /home partition.

The solution I found best is to have symbolic links in the /home folder (that resides in the system root; no separate /home partition).