Store ALL configs (ES, retroarch, retropie, etc) to external drive and mount it as home directory

[feel]

Hi,

I could not find a similar topic, so I have decided to create a new one.

I would like to have the possibility to store all my configs (emulationstation and retroarch, etc) and my roms in an external drive, so that I can re-image the SD card with a new Retropie image and having all my data still retained.

By generalizing the wiki page https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive
I was able to come up with a solution that achieves that by simply mounting the entire /home/pi directory towards my USB drive. Every single config directory in my home (i.e. /home/pi/.emulationstation and /home/pi/.config/retroarch) is no longer a symlink to /opt/retropie/configs/all/... but instead is a copy so that the configs are actually stored in the external drive.

The unique inconvenient came up when I had to configure the input controller from ES. The key mapping gets stored automagically by ES to retroarch too, but ES stored the config into /opt/retropie/configs/retroarch/... instead of looking to the user home directory first (~/.config/retroarch). Generally, all applications in Linux give priority to user defined config before taking a look at system config. I believe this would be beneficial for Retropie too as it would allow to make a clear separation of data simplifying life for the final user.

Do you also consider this an important feature that should be part for future Retropie releases?

Thank you

[sunwind]

What was the solution? I'm trying to mount all my configs and roms and everything on an external usb so the 'OS' just runs from the card and nothing else.