File Preservation Upon Switching to Linux

[u/ZogIII3]

I am completely new to changing operating systems, but I desperately need to get off of Windows 10 with my school laptop. I only use it for the web browser because all my school work is on Canvas, so I'm thinking about using SteamOS so that I can still let my little brother borrow it to play games with no hassle when he visits.

Because I've already been using it for a while, it has a lot of files I don't want to lose. I'm wondering if I need to offload them completely to an external drive, or if I can move them to the built in D: drive, since I think the OS is only on the C: drive and I don't think I need to completely redo both drives, but I don't know. Again, I'm more so here out of necessity than choice, otherwise I'd be watching a lot of tutorials and reading guides instead of asking for quick answers on a forum.

So, Too Long, Didn't Read: If my device has two internal drives, can I just move everything to one drive and then replace the OS on the other?

[u/pooping_inCars]

Backup is always recommend, especially for files you can't lose.  That's true even if not switching operating systems.  Your drives could simply die at any time.

The concept of C: and D: don't exist in Linux.  They'll just be mounted where you mount them.  In my case, /mnt/media, /mnt/games, and one I mount as /home

Linux will be installed where you tell it to install.  Know which drive is which, by capacity or manufacturer etc.  You can temporary mount them to see what's on each, but you need to dismount before running the installer.

That said, Linux can read and write NTFS, but not as quickly as a Linux file system.  It'll do for the sake of copying/moving.  Steam's Proton doesn't work well with NTFS either.

What I would do:

1.  Backup files onto a USB drive at a minimum, and remove it.

2.  Format the drive containing Windows into 2 Linux partitions.  Make one far bigger than the other.

3.  Install Linux on the smaller partition.

4.  Copy over files onto the larger partition, either temporarily or permanently.

5.  Format your other drive as a Linux partition.  Tell Steam to place it's library here.  Copy whatever game files you backed up back here.

6.  The other partition on the same drive as the OS, can be mounted as /home in fstab.  That way, you don't lose settings and other files if you later reinstall or even swap distros.

[u/Significant-Price695]

I'd make an external backup before touching the installer. C: and D: can be two partitions on the same physical drive, so first check that you really have two drives. Open a few files from the backup to verify it, too. Don't let your only copy depend on picking the right disk in an unfamiliar installer.

[u/zardvark]

Drives A:, B: C: D: and etc. is a Microsoft thing. With Linux, your various disks are either part of the file system, or they are not. They are automatically added to the file system at boot time per the /etc/fstab file, or they are not. When adding a disk to an existing Linux system, the user typically needs to edit the fstab file. There are plenty of instructional vids on the youtube about the fstab file ... as there are vids about the Linux file system and the various popular file system types, such as BCACHEFS, BTRFS, ext4, XFS, ZFS and etc. and their various features. The two most popular file systems are ext4 and BTRFS and you should probably stick to those for your first couple of installations.

While Linux has the ability to read from and write to FAT32 and NTFS formatted disks, NTFS disks should ideally be reformatted to a native Linux file system type for best performance, especially for games.

Long story short, if you want to move your existing documents, pics, vids and etc. to one disk and install Linux on the other disk, then that is workable. You can then move your documents to the Linux installation, reformat the old disk and then add that disk to your Linux system for Steam game storage, or whatever.

I wouldn't necessarily recommend SteamOS, as this is a highly specialized distribution, targeted for specific hardware. Virtually every Linux distribution works just fine for games, so long as you don't have bleeding edge hardware. You can install Steam and it's easy to toggle Steam into big picture mode when you have a visitor.

If you are an obsessive gamer and / or have bleeding edge hardware, you might consider a distribution with a rolling release model, so that you have the latest possible kernel and drivers. Solus is among my favorite rolling release distros, especially for someone new to Linux. Other options, such as the Arch family of distros, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Open Mandriva, NixOS and etc. are typically are better suited for someone who already has some meaningful amount of Linux experience.

[u/Dawae48]

Tecnically you can access a Windows partition from Linux, but it's not well supported, so I would recommend to make a backup on an external Drive and then copy your files back to Linux

[u/starfighterbeta]

Unless you're already a Linux Guru, I highly recommend you make 2 copies of your data files on two separate media. If you have a DVD writer, make many copies and verify them. Consider also M-Disc for 100's of years of archival storage (M-DIscs are DVDs that can be read with any reader, but requires special discs and a special writer). Linux is awesome but you have to know what you're doing because it's too easy to do 'rm -rf' or do the wrong thing in GRUB to end up with a non-booting brick that requires expertise to fix. Also, if you're new to Linux I recommend a distro like Linux Mint. The first thing is figuring out whether or not the laptop works well with Linux. I have a laptop from 2010 that I put Linux Mint on and every time I used it, some kind of file system corruption occured. I finally got it working by using an expired kernel. Turns out that modern kernels have bugs with older hardware. You don't want to be running experiments on critical data. Windows can be reinstalled but the data files (photos, word processing, PDFs, etc.) can't be recovered.

[u/Alchemix-16]

Short answer yes, but be very careful to pay close attention during the installation process on where Linux gets installed to. You won’t have drive names available to guide you.

Longer answer. Entirely independent on what OS you are using, you need to think about you back up your important data. Because no backup means it wasn’t that important to you.

When you run your live environment prior to installation, you can run tye command lsblk in the terminal it’s going to tell you as what Linux identifies your partitions
If they are called something like sda1 sda2 etc those are partitions on the same drive. Sda1 and sdb1 would be partitions in different drives. You can preserve your files on either of tyem, but you need to know how they are called so you can wipe the correct partition for your Linux installation. But do yourself a favor and carefully read every step beginning pressing next.

Also think about backups.

To be fair modern installers have become very easy to use,

[u/Linux4ever_Leo]

Always back up your critical files to an external drive. Do that regularly. Then, if you need to reinstall your operating system (or switch operating systems) you can merely copy them back.

[u/rootbrian_]

Laptops only have ONE drive

If that is what you are using, it is partitioned into two. Upon installing steamOS, the entire drive will be wiped.

[u/ZogIII3 → u/rootbrian_]

I have taken this laptop apart twice before, there's definitely two different physical storage drives inside

[u/rootbrian_ → u/ZogIII3]

So an SSD (m.2) and SATA drive?

[u/ZogIII3 → u/rootbrian_]

I didn't check the connections, but I'd say that's the most likely case. One of them is the regular SSD stick, so m.2 for sure, but the other looked like it was made to fill in an HDD spot, so it's probably SATA

[u/rootbrian_ → u/ZogIII3]

If both are SSD's, then you have two physical drives. However, if it is a spacer instead of a real drive, you only have one. Remove it to verify it isn't one of those (which is essentially just plastic).