I have in my old laptop a dual boot setup of windows11 and zorin os. But I am interested in switching Zorin to OpenSUSE tumvleweed. How can I safely do it without losing the data?
Safely? Make a backup on an external drive. That’s at least safe-ish. Not trying to be flippant, this is just the only way I know that would qualify as “safe”.
To add to this. You can use a tool like rsync for this. rsync -aAxv /home/username /destination/
This will copy over youthome folder to rhe destination (network share,USB,External drive etc)
Then reinstalland and do it in reverse.
The simplest way would probably be to just buy some external storage, like a usb drive, and move the files to that before switching. You can buy a 250GB usb hard drive for around $20 on Amazon.
If you’re not worried about privacy and don’t want to spend money on more storage, you could use a cloud storage service to move your files. I’ve used mega.io to do that in the past, but the amount of free storage is limited.
if you are worried about cloud security then you can encrypt things before you upload them
That’s true!
You could install OpenSUSE in the partition that had zorin, overwriting the previous system.
And what about the data? What is the best way to manage them?
Restore the data from backup. You’ve got a backup of your important data, right? Right?
Yes, I have an extra copy of the data in an external hard drive.
In that case simply wipe/re-install and restore your backup. Ideally test that procedure in a VM or something before you wipe.
And while doing that it’s best practice to create a partition only for /home. Easy to distrohop.
Make /home a separate partition.
Backup your home directory to a separate drove, then wipe the drive and create separate partitions for /, /home, and optionally, /var.
