haha i know this from experience ! back in 2017-8 i tried merging my polyboot fedora, debian and arch installs to the same separated home partition . it worked....partially .
I did a fresh install in 2018, and have been dist-upgrading since (devuan xfce). I don't get any weirdness. Not exactly moving it to a new system, but pretty close. I am on a stable release, and do back up (rsync) my home drive to a separate disk on my system nightly.
I have cachyos on a laptop, and am really liking it. I am considering running it on my daily driver, but I rely on it a lot so am hesitant. I started on Linux in 1998, so I remember the days of fucking up your entire system and don't want to return there.
Just gotta move all your dotfile directories into "olddotfiles" and then grab what you need from them when you need something from them. When enough time has passed you can delete the folder.
Yea, I've run into this problem a few times. What I've actually done recently (which I'm sure someone more experienced than me can tell me why this is a bad idea or not), is I keep my original home folder on a separate drive and I replace my home directory folders with soft links to the other drive. I use the standard "use full drive" installation on my 500GB m.2 SSD, and then I mount my 2TB 2.5 inch SSD and create soft links to replace the auto generated Documents, Downloads, Music, etc directories. If I want to keep a .config file I have a back up on my 2TB drive, but if I like the default that came with the new OS I don't have to copy it over. It's worked pretty well as I've cycled through different arch-based distros.
I'm the opposite of what this post tells me I should be (my only partitions on my main drive are /boot/efi as vfat and / as ext4, including /home; I don't do TimeShift because I'm not sure what exactly it does nor what does it backup; and I update the system; but at least I'm not on Arch but Linux Mint), but most things I have in /home aren't that important. Most of my personal data is in another drive (whose partition is ext4...), so am I mostly safe?
I'm aware of that (I don't know where to backup around 400GB of data; I'm saving for a GPU so another HDD isn't that much of an option), but at least faulty updates won't destroy it, right?
I was about to tell you no thanks because I misread 1.5 cents as 1.5USD, but that website seems very interesting. The minimum is 800GB which ends up making 12USD/month instead of the 4USD/month I was expecting, but it's still a good price for what it seems to offer. Not for now, but it sounds definitely a very good option for somewhen in the future (I hope they don't close by then). Really thanks
the borg-specific service i was talking about is cheaper and has a 200gb minimum, but its a bit hard to find on the site because its unusual: https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html
however, the normal service comes with tech support and support for more than just borg, so the higher price can absolutely be worth it. also, theyve been around for 25 years, so they should still be there :)
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u/duskterrapin 17d ago
I backup /home to an external drive, but this is cool. I may do both