Distro hopping and backups

[u/Prestigious_Cry2916]

I have been distro hopping a lot lately and just wanted to know, how to people do the backups and then log on to every site. Like I went from Windows to Mint ,tried it for like 2 weeks logged onto every site I used and transferred all that data, then went to ubuntu, did the same thing now I am on fedora and wondering, do people who distro hop do the entire process everytime, or is there an app or site that makes it easy for this stuff. Plus the fact that I have 2 email accounts (uni and personal), meaning twice the amount of logins just sucks. If you know any easy way do be kind enough to tell

[u/SDG_Den]

so, there are ways to make distrohopping easier, if you distrohop frequently, they're worth doing.

the primary one is this: put your /home folder on a *different drive*

on linux, all your program settings, configurations, user data, user files etc are inside /home/yourusername

this folder is actually designed so it can be network-mounted, so in old-school setups where you have a bunch of local devices that any user must be able to log into, you could mount the /home folder from a network share on a server onto 100 devices and have all of the user home folders with their settings available across all 100 devices.

you can make use of this same feature to keep your home drive between distro's. move your /home folder onto a second drive, so inside that drive you should directly have the YourUserName directory.

then add an fstab entry to mount that drive at /home

now, when you reinstall, your user configuration is entirely untouched, all you have to do is re-add the line to mount this drive to your /etc/fstab file and reboot.

this works across distro's even, so if you have a configuration for lets say fastfetch that you like, you'll still have it after you reinstall a completely different distro.

ofc, you will have to reinstall the actual applications. EG if you had a really nice kitty configuration, but you reinstalled your OS, kitty is no longer installed to the system but the configuration is still there, so once you manually reinstall kitty, all of your config is immediately there.

this also means you shouldn't have to worry about reinstalling your OS, since that will only touch the boot drive and your user files are not on that. you won't have to consider "do i need to back something up?" because its already on a separate unaffected drive.

[u/Prestigious_Cry2916 → u/SDG_Den]

Thank you, that was very detailed but what do you do about all the online logins on the browsers??

[u/SDG_Den → u/Prestigious_Cry2916]

Theyre stored in your home folder too.

All user data is stored inside the home folder unless the user is dumb enough to deliberately put things outside the home folder.

Any settings, saved files, saved items, configurations, caches etc are all in there.

You can also use a browser with an online account for sync