cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/40885318
I’m going to switch from Windows 11 to Linux soon but first I wish to backup every every data and config files I can in my current Windows installation, even those that wouldn’t natively work in Linux. I know the \Users folder is important to back up, but I don’t know what other directories I am missing.
Buy a new hard drive/SSD for your Linux installation. Put your Windows drive away in a drawer so all of its contents are saved, and you can swap it back in if you have to. A USB adapter can be helpful for retrieving files.
But first before you buy a new SSD don’t forget to go back to September of last year.
If you have enough space for it, just keep it in the PC.
I did this, and installed the old drive into a USB adapter so I could easily pull any documents I may want to access. The Linux install will mount a NTFS drive, so worked great for that.
For the OP, while you CAN have the PC boot up to the Windows drive plugged into USB, I would not recommend doing it more than a couple times. Windows seems to hate this; I’ve had two installations of Win10 Pro eat itself and become unbootable, could not be repaired. The files were still accessible through Linux though so was able to make copies.
- C:/Users > all user data from all users on the PC
or just from a single user
%userprofile%/AppData
%userprofile%/documents
%userprofile%/(everything else like pictures, videos, etc.) - C:/ProgramData > some programs saving files here, so all users can use the data
- C:/Program Files > majority of programs are installed here
- C:/Program Files (86x) > some programs are installed here
- C:/Users > all user data from all users on the PC
Resize your Windows partition to be smaller, then install Linux in the newly-freed space. You can boot into GParted to resize the partition.
Yeah, you’re gonna want to back up your drive first? Before you start messing with partitioning tools.
Of course.
Exactly! Your user data is stored in
c:\users. This includes, well, your user data for all of the users, including all user-spefific configuration files and application data and actual files and directories created by the user.Unfortunately lots of configuration is stored in the registry and is useless for transitioning them over to Linux. Same with most Windows software that doesn’t use the registry. You’ll unfortunately also find configuration files all.over the place. Might it be in the application’s installation directory
c:\ProgramData, or somewhere else.You can use some program like macrium or whatever to make a complete compressed image of your windows drive on some other device and then pick through it when you’re ready.
That requires that you have some device with as much storage as is used on your windows drive(s).
Dd if=your_windows_drive | tar lvqf some_output_file.tar.bz
