From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

On 2026-02-20, St|-phane CARPENTIER wrote:

Le 18-02-2026, Lawrence DrCOOliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> a |-crit-a:

Jack Wallen offers some tips for prospective distro-hoppers: >><https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-switch-linux-distros-and-retain-all-of-your-data/>.

His first tip is to use the rCLmanualrCY installation option to put your
/home on a separate disk. You can also put it on a separate partition
of the same disk. WhatrCOs the point of this? Well, at partitioning
time, you can allocate, not one, but *two* OS partitions. Use only one
of them for this installation, but leave the other one available for a
future alternative OS installation. You can point this at the exact
same /home partition you have already created with the first install,
and have access to all your existing user files that way.

He also mentions symlinking your user Documents directory from another
disk. You could also just point that additional disk directly in your
Documents directory. Symlinking can lead to some fiddliness with
bulk-copying files, backup/restore etc, which is why I find direct
mounting to be less troublesome.

I didn't read the full article because he said that messing up with a

I didn't even bother opening given the first two words of Lawrence's
post (over the past year other articles by Jack Wallen were discussed
here, most notably the one that was recycled at least once, or even
twice IIRC).

Now I wish I could killfile based on that (well, certainly I could, by
doing some match on the body, but that's still no header, let alone one
cheap to match...).

change of distro imply loosing all personal data. Which means he
consider one doesn't have backup. So the first tip should be to have
backups before considering anything else. Even keeping the same distro doesn't help to avoid backups. So, no, I won't read the full article and
I won't consider a good use of my time to considering his advices.

--
Nuno Silva
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From Newsgroup: comp.os.linux.misc

Lawrence DrCOOliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

St|-phane CARPENTIER wrote:

Which means he consider one doesn't have backup. So the first tip
should be to have backups before considering anything else.

Speaking of backups, you know as well as I do that they are far too
commonly neglected. Every time a discussion about doing them comes up
in some of these newsgroups, I get the feeling that the very concept
itself seems to be poorly understood by some. Too often, the
suggestion is made that you must make rCLimagerCY backups, which require special tools and are cumbersome to restore, instead of just doing
regular file copies which can be managed with standard Linux file-manipulation tools.

I think these misconceptions could be coming from Windows users (or ex-Windows users) who are too accustomed to Windows ways of doing
things ...

A byte-for-byte full disk backup makes sense if you want to an exact
restore of a whole system in a single operation, i.e. without having to
redo partitioning and the boot loader. It was particularly relevant when historical boot loaders were installed (at least partially) outside of
any partition.

ItrCOs not a bad bad fit for de-risking upgrades. ItrCOs a reasonable mitigation for storage failure risk too - in the best case, restoring
service might be as simple as swapping in the physical backup device and booting from that.

ItrCOs not the strategy I usually use myself but IrCOm pretty confident in
my ability to deal with whatever a failed upgrade throws at me. Someone
who is less experienced at, for example, fixing broken boot loaders
might well prefer to revert the system to its exact pre-upgrade state
and have a working computer while they think about what to do next.
--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/
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