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.
Backup your home directory to a separate drove, then wipe the drive and create separate partitions for /, /home, and optionally, /var.
You could install OpenSUSE in the partition that had zorin, overwriting the previous system.
Make /home a separate partition.
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.
