I’m finally planning to shift my primary PC to Linux in the coming week. I want to ensure all of my data from Windows be transferred to Linux, including my personal files and application data, even if there is no native support in Linux to access it.

For context, my setup has become untidy over the years; I have two partitions :C & :D and stored personal data in each partition, plus I have created directories of my own in several odd locations which I cannot recall but they also contain some critical files. I only have a single NVMe SSD installed that is almost out of space so I cannot dualboot, although I can make use of an external HDD during the transfer. I’ve already had some experience in Linux by installing it in another PC immediately after purchasing it.

Is there some way to automatically prepare all my data in Windows for transfer into Linux directly or in a backup drive accessible in Linux? Please don’t tell me I have to copy and paste all files by hand because given the criticality of the stored data I would rather stay in Windows than risking data loss.

  • apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml
    2·
    13 hours ago

    Start with a portable hard drive which only has one job “store a copy of your critical data”.

    • move the drive as infrequently as possible, especially when it’s turned on.
    • only ever write to it when you do your periodic backup.
    • only plug it in when you need to read from or write to it.

    It’s a paranoid set of rules, but if this data is critical, this is a good idea. Even better is to have an additional copy of that data in cloud storage.

    As far as operating system, you absolutely can use a Linux machine, but learning a new system risks you accidentally deleting data so be careful. Linux has ways of reading windows-formatted hard drives, so as much as I prefer Linux, I would say don’t try new things on the machine which hold critical data.