Salutations!

I’ve been running Manjaro on my T495 without a hitch for a long time, now. With all the chatter about Manjaro possibly not being maintained, I wanted to explore jumping to a different distro like CachyOS. The problem is, when I installed Manjaro on a BTRFS filesystem, I didn’t make a separate /home partition. Is there a way to migrate to CachyOS without deleting /home?

I realize BTRFS uses subvolumes instead of “real” partitions, but I’m not sure how to proceed. In my initial searches, there is a process to rename the subvolumes to something else, install CachyOS, then use rsync to restore my files, but I don’t know WHERE to do this. In the LiveUSB environment? During the installer? (See post Here)

Or am I better off just using rsync to backup the whole /home folder to an external drive, install CachyOS fresh, then rsync my files over when the installer is completed but before I boot for the first time?

Apologies if this is some basic stuff, I just don’t want to lose any data, especially my Docker containers and pictures.

  • Björn@swg-empire.deEnglish
    81·
    2 days ago

    Doing a backup is good practice either way. But I’ve done plenty of Linux installs where I simply deleted everything on / except for /home and then installed onto that. Never saw a distribution that couldn’t handle it.

    You should maybe take a look at your /etc/fstab and see how your subvolumes are laid out. Maybe Cachy needs something different for stuff like snapper. But that’s nothing you can’t fix manually.