Save my private files

Brainstorm
1

I’ve been using KDE Neon since Plasma 5.7, and I’m now looking forward to KDE Linux! It runs fine on my Lenovo x390 notebook.:smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

I always put the /home directory on an independent partition. If I need to reinstall the system, my private files will remain on this self-contained partition. As I can read on invent.kde !135,!307, a recovery system for /home based on btrfs and snapper is in the works. Very nice.:grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

But, if /home is just a subvolume on a btrfs partition and co-located with /, does Calamares overwrite /home on a new install?

I always save my private files on a second drive in my home network as an unencrypted, uncompressed 1:1 copy. I can access this drive via SMB. At the moment I mount the network drive using a cifs command in /etc/fstab. This also works with KDE Linux. But this is higher mathematics that not every user can do. With Dolphin I was unable to mount the SMB network drive transparently for other programs. Am I lacking the necessary knowledge?

So far I like to use the backup tools from the KDE Neon system settings as a backup program. Unfortunately I can’t find the program Kup - synchronized backup - in KDE Linux. Is it possible to add this back?

Thanks.

2

Since KDE Linux doesn’t install homedirs on a separate partition, then yeah, if you re-install the system, you’ll lose all user files.

However, the idea is that you’ll never need to re-install the system in the traditional way, by going through the installer. Instead, if you need or want to, you can do a “factory reset” that basically erases all system-level customization but preserves user files.

This hasn’t been developed, yet, but it’s on the roadmap.

Kup isn’t pre-installed as we also plan to develop a more bespoke backup system that makes use of Btrfs snapshots directly.