Hey gang. This may be something MOST windows users won't need to worry about since they will have a Single Drive Install system. For myself and many others we have at least two or more drives.
What HARDWARE drive wise is 2TB boot drive and 4TB Data drive. I've made sure ALL my data is backed up to my Synology Drive already.
I watched a video how to move /home to the 4TB drive. What I'd like to know is the recommended INSTALL partitioning for a new install. And where should I point my TimeShift backup files?
My understanding is TimeShift will only backup the system leaving the /home alone? Please help me understand. Cheers
Do you want a Single Boot or Dualboot with Windows?
The easiest way for a Single Boot (Zorin only) would be to use the automatic installation and install Zorin on your 2TB drive. Then you won't get a separate /home partition by default.
After the installation you could automount your 4 TB data drive with the app "disks".
You can put your /home directory to the 4TB drive, but I haven't done this before, so others can give better advice.
You would need a 512 MB partition for /boot in FAT32 and the rest for /root in ext4 on your 2TB drive and /home on your 4TB drive. I wouldn't recommend this as the 2TB drive is too large for only using for /boot and /root.
You could e.g. make the partitions
512 MB /boot
80-100 GB /root
the rest for /home
on your 2TB drive.
If you consider to try different distributions, I would recommend to keep your personal datas separate from /home on your 4TB drive.
There's not one recommended way to install Linux, or any other operating system for that matter. It's all about what works best for your needs and use case.
My advice is to keep things simple to start with. Installing Zorin OS in your 2TB drive using nothing but the defaults should give you plenty of room to experiment and test things out. You can still access your other drive through the file manager normally. But it would be good to know if you plan on having a dual-boot system with Windows, or another Linux distribution.
A more advanced option would be to use LVM to merge both drives and create whatever partitions you think you will need. With LVM these partitions can be resized on demand, so you can make those decisions as you go.
This flexibility is nice but it adds complexity. With that much storage, you probably don't need this, but I'm only mentioning it to point out that you have choices.
As for Timeshift, I don't really use it myself, but my understanding is that it will create a directory at the root of the filesystem in /timeshift by default. You can create a dedicated partition for it, if you want.
And no, it will not (and should not) make backups of your personal files located at /home. Note that snapshots are not really backups, they are more like a safety net to recover from when something breaks after an update, installing a new package, etc.
Again, simple is better to get started with. I'd go with installing on the 2TB drive using nothing but the defaults. As you get more comfortable, you can look into making decisions on additional partitions and whatnot.
If you want to try something a little more advanced, it would be good to know more about how you use your computer in a little more detail. Games, for example, take a lot of space these days.
After 20 years of Linux usage, the separate /home is a premium idea. So for example 100GB for / is okay and the rest for /home and swap.
Reason for that: You can reinstall the system on / without formatting the existing /home again and again. For some data that regulary get a backup this is not the big whopper. But think about having Steam with 1.5TB of installed games on your /home and now a format is required. Teeth in the table........
My Acer Nitro 5 have a 256GB drive for EFI and / while the games are on the second 2TB SSD in /home. The Nitro has seen Linuxmint, Fedora and Zorin-17 with the same /home and all installed stuff survived.
I am dumping windows for good. My new rule is if I can't find a linux alternative I then ask myself, how just important is this app to me?
Next, will it run under wine? If I get no to either I will find a way around having to use it.
I have hated MS since my old DOS days. Back when MS ushered in WindowsNT I told my colleague that in about 20 years they will move to a fully subscription service. He laughed in my face. Well I've been hearing that Win12 will be that next step with MS. Buckle Up. LOL
I have the 4tb since I do video editing. Doing editing and producing files is a lot faster locally than if the files are located on my synology NAS drive. I currently have that setup to back up the winbloat systems. Once I get my main PC setup I'll convert all the others over to Linux and only backup data to the NAS drive.
I have another PC sitting here with the same storage drive settup: 2TB Main 4TB data. I will take that 2nd PC and setup either QEMU or docker so I can use it as my lab and dev space. I like to tinker with different distros and. Virt Machines is the best for doing this. Mess something up? simple restart the container with initial setup. Easy peasy.
AS for other PC and Laptops Zorin OS default install should suffice.
I love LINUX because it is extremely versatile. thanks for the info.
From what I am understanding though. All I need to is move my /home to the 4tb and setup the TimeShift to save the snapshots. Which is OK with me. I just needed to figure out if I needed to reinstall with specific partitioning of the 2TB drive.
You might need to, but that will depend on your currentpartition layout. Could you share a screenshot of the drive as it appears from the Disks application?
I was ALWAYS a Microsoft disinter. I knew back then the iron grip Bill gates wanted on the software industry and I could foresee software moving to subscription SAAS model even then. People mocked me, but I was right in the end. Look at how many products are a SAAS now. They get you locked into these services via a subscription and your data is no longer yours.
Look how successful Apple was in the early days. Their rules their way from day one. They never changed the model. Gates envied that. So here we are today. Win12 is heavily rumored to be an SAAS model OS! I refuse to pay to use my own machine.
So, Linux here I am. Soon I will cancel ALL MS subscriptions and any other SAAS I have. Still looking at a STEAM competitor to come out that let's you OWN the games you purchase. As it stands STEAM owns the software you purchase. Just try and download the game and install without steam. I dare you. If you can, please let me know.
any way, that's is the short version. Sometimes we get these insights and dismiss them out of hand. I'm glad I never did.
Thank, but I've got it all figured out. I just went with install Zorin OS to 2TB drive (I know wasted space) and the /home to the 4TB drive. Very happy with install.
Now setting up home lab with PROXMOX on a similar setup for VM's and DOCKER containers. Will put Zorin OS in one vm for my mom to play with and let her learn linux. This will save her PC I will install Zorin OS to for working environment. I think it's best way.
I highly recommend new linux users find an old pc or laptop to install Zorin OS to learn Linux while keeping main PC going either with Zorin OS or their current Winblows install. Less frustration for them.
