One thing that always bugged me is that everything on my development server is in my home directory except my databases. As I go on the road a lot and like to have my server on my laptop, "syncing" the server becomes annoying. I usually use rsync, but unless you enable the root account, you won't be able to synchronize the elusive /var/lib/mysql folder. And we all know what the community thinks of enabling the root account. This is just one of the countless reasons why I decided to move my databases to my home directory. It's also nice knowing that I need to backup only my home folder. Fortunately MySQL presents an easy way to change the user the process should run as.