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Switching distro without loosing data in /home (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions

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Is there a way to move distro without loosing data in /home? I am currently running Pop OS and want to move to Nix OS while keeping the data. Normally I could use an external hard drive or my server, but most of my equipment is in storage at the moment. Current partition setup is using LUKS and LVM with ext4. I am guessing there is a way to manipulate the LVM to make it work by adding another partition and installing into it.

I know this is probably a convoluted idea. I am trying to avoid spending money an another external drive.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I moved my home to its own partition a while ago and recently changed my os. It worked well, just had to modify fstab to remap my home drive in the new OS. Not sure if this is what you’re after but I accomplished it al on my main drive by modifying partitions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah this might be the way. I was hoping I could use something like btrfs subvolumes or some LVM shenanigans to share space with the root. Might not be possible though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Eveytime I see btrfs, I keep thinking it's pronounced "Better FS", but that's not what it stands for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think it stands for b-tree as that's the data structure is uses internally. I could be wrong though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes, B-Tree File System. But Better FS is the dapper Winnie the Poo pronounciation

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Why not Butter FS?

Also what's it better than? Than ZFS? Not really. Than BCacheFS? Maybe right now but probably not for long.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Ironic naming.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Sure. I think with LVM you have decoupled your partitions from their physical location on the disk. You could shrink and move logical volumes around, make some (free) space for a new one and install a new distro on it. Or just replace the PopOs root with a new operating system.

As I remember it's not super easy but there are quite some wiki articles about LVM and guides on how to shrink/change LVM volumes including the filesystem inside. LUKS+LVM+ext4 is a pretty common scenario.

However... Having a Backup of important data is always a good idea. Especially when playing around with partitions and filesystems. And more so if you don't exactly know what you're doing.