The title says it all, I’d like to switch my operating system and preserve most of my files. Any other info I should know before the move would be nice as well.
Copy them to an external drive or another computer, copy them back after.
Chances are you’re gonna wanna wipe the partition table on your switch over so I’d just copy them out then back in. No point over complicating things.
If you’re frequently distro-hopping, I recommend using a seperate
/homepartition. I did that before I settled down, I can’t begin to describe how convenient it was (especially if you use Flatpak).To do this one could install the new distro on a new partition, boot to it, delete everything from the old installation except the hone directory, move your user to the base directory (/home/sorrybookbroke -> /sorrybookbroke) before editing your /etc/fstab and mounting the old partition to /home
This way, no external drive is needed like @Luci@lemmy.ca suggested. Of course, their suggestion is the easiest, but this is the one I personally chose.
