From Tara to Cindy

[salpiche]

I searched and could not find a coherent answer. I have been running Mint 19 Tara since released however would like to use LMDE 3, is it possible to switch from one to the other without losing my personal files and data or do I have to do a full reinstall? I know that Mint 19 is based on Ubuntu and LMDE is debian and both are pretty much the same however I am hoping for a performance boost from using LMDE rather than Ubuntu. Suggestions, tips, ideas and straight answers are welcome. Thanks

[catweazel]

I searched and could not find a coherent answer. I have been running Mint 19 Tara since released however would like to use LMDE 3, is it possible to switch from one to the other without losing my personal files and data or do I have to do a full reinstall? I know that Mint 19 is based on Ubuntu and LMDE is debian and both are pretty much the same however I am hoping for a performance boost from using LMDE rather than Ubuntu. Suggestions, tips, ideas and straight answers are welcome. Thanks

If your home is on its own partition then you can simply mount home during install. Otherwise, backup your treasured stuff, including all the hidden files in home.

[richyrich]

If you've got lots of room on your hard drive, have you considered dual booting ?

[AZgl1800]

just make a partition and run both of them


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Gparted.png

[Pierre]

to elaborate on AZgl1500 has said:
something that I've often done, is to use a separate / root ,,
but use a common /home - - the thing is, that each system has it's own /username
& is thus isolated from any other system.

the main advantage of this method, is that you only need to supply an separate / root ,,
for each system of around 15 -20 Gb each.

with a modern hard-drive, you can give that common / home of upwards of 2- 300 Gb

[salpiche]

That's what I figured, I used to set up a /home partition but this time I didn't and just let the system do the easy install. So I am now backing up all of my work load and getting ready for lots of fun doing everything again.. thanks for the replies.

[salpiche]

If you've got lots of room on your hard drive, have you considered dual booting ?

Don't really like dual boot. But yes I did take it under consideration.
thanks

[salpiche]

to elaborate on AZgl1500 has said:
something that I've often done, is to use a separate / root ,,
but use a common /home - - the thing is, that each system has it's own /username
& is thus isolated from any other system.

the main advantage of this method, is that you only need to supply an separate / root ,,
for each system of around 15 -20 Gb each.

with a modern hard-drive, you can give that common / home of upwards of 2- 300 Gb

That's what I used to do, but didn't really like dual booting, just rather have one OS and not worry about the rest, and since I do not use Windows or Mac I have no need for dual boot. However as suggested I will be redoing ,my system on LMDE and creating an /home partition thus going back to basics.

Thanks Family

[Distorted]

I searched and could not find a coherent answer. I have been running Mint 19 Tara since released however would like to use LMDE 3, is it possible to switch from one to the other without losing my personal files and data or do I have to do a full reinstall? I know that Mint 19 is based on Ubuntu and LMDE is debian and both are pretty much the same however I am hoping for a performance boost from using LMDE rather than Ubuntu. Suggestions, tips, ideas and straight answers are welcome. Thanks

i too im wanting to upgrade from Tara to Cindy and im still new to Mint. i did setup a dual boot on this PC running win 7 alongside . not sure what im suppose to i see posts saying do fresh install . i did setup time shift on here so i know if mess up i can run Live CD i made ... i was hoping to to just install the Cindy upgrade over Tara. Not sure on what to do at this point

[Moem]

i too im wanting to upgrade from Tara to Cindy and im still new to Mint. i did setup a dual boot on this PC running win 7 alongside . not sure what im suppose to i see posts saying do fresh install . i did setup time shift on here so i know if mess up i can run Live CD i made ... i was hoping to to just install the Cindy upgrade over Tara. Not sure on what to do at this point

It's not an upgrade since Cindy is not a newer version of Mint than Tara, it's a different OS really. You can install one OS over the other and thus install Cindy over Tara, overwriting it. That is an installation, not an upgrade.

[srq2625]

to elaborate on AZgl1500 has said:
something that I've often done, is to use a separate / root ,,
but use a common /home - - the thing is, that each system has it's own /username
& is thus isolated from any other system.

the main advantage of this method, is that you only need to supply an separate / root ,,
for each system of around 15 -20 Gb each.

with a modern hard-drive, you can give that common / home of upwards of 2- 300 Gb

Another option on this theme:

• /boot/efi - if installing on a UEFI machine
• /swap - size driven by memory size and requirement to hibernate. If you won't be hibernating and you have 8GB (or more) of memory (depending on what you will be doing with your computer), this partition becomes completely optional
• Partition for LM 19, make /home a folder, not a separate partition - ~30GB will be more than sufficient
• Partition for LMDE 3, make /home a folder, not a separate partition - ~30GB, again, more the sufficient
• Finally, a partition for data to be held in common - this will be the largest partition on the drive

So, if you are booting without UEFI, you have 4 primary partitions and you're good to go. If you are booting UEFI, then your disk is likely to be GPT and the first partition will be required, but GPT allows for up to 127 partition (or is it 128, I don't remember, I just know it's a huge number) and you're good to go again.

The advantage of this arrangement is that your /home folders will hold separate the customizations for each O/S and thus reducing/eliminating that kind of collision. Your data will live on in it's own happy place and will not be bothered by any changing out of O/S.

[AZgl1800]

My laptop has UEFI, but it is locked out into Legacy Mode. Windows left the house 2 years ago.

My laptop has 12gB RAM, and my Swap partition, I shrunk back to 14 Mbytes.
It has a 500gB SSD which all together make for a very pleasant PC to use.

I have LMDE3-Cindy in a 20gB partition, and linked to /home
this OS is very smooth and so far, has been perfectly well behaved...
but, I have a lot of hours in developing the DE on 18.3 and don't want to start doing all that research over again for a different OS.

for me, it is the online enjoyment and relaxation of being able to use the PC, rather than the underlying OS that is doing the job. so, I fully suspect, that I will be using 18.3 until she has been retired.

[JerryF]

I recently went from 18.3 Cinnamon to 19 Xfce and tried to use my /home partition for 19. That didn't work out well. Several of my programs didn't work and there were small glitches here and there. I had to install 19 with a clean /home partition, then copied important hidden folders for programs such as .thunderbird. The rest I recreated which didn't take that long.

If you can, I'd make a copy of your Tara /home partition and try using it with Cindy. See if all goes well and if so, you can remove the original /home partition

[AZgl1800]

I recently went from 18.3 Cinnamon to 19 Xfce and tried to use my /home partition for 19. That didn't work out well. Several of my programs didn't work and there were small glitches here and there. I had to install 19 with a clean /home partition, then copied important hidden folders for programs such as .thunderbird. The rest I recreated which didn't take that long.

If you can, I'd make a copy of your Tara /home partition and try using it with Cindy. See if all goes well and if so, you can remove the original /home partition

I think that is the Mint version that I tried to co-mingle /home completely with 18.3 and the result screwed up 18.3

I started seeing "ghosts" if you will, images where they don't belong, files saved where they don't belong, and Preferences in 18.3 being changed.

I used the extra partition where LM19 was, to install LMDE3, and let it install as a single install with its' own /home internal to that partition.

My new LMDE3-Cindy is set up so that I can view 18.3's /home and can save or retrieve files from it, but it is not directly linked. For me, it is a lesson learned.

[TeaSwigger]

Alternately one could rename one's old home folder in the old /home partition whilst in the live environment, say append 'backup' to the folder; when installing, select the existing /home parition, configure the installer to use it as /home as one would to create a seperate /home parition but do not select to format that partition. The installer will create a fresh folder for your user and the renamed old one will still be there on the same parition for you to access after the install if need be.

Of course one should always first create a backup of one's home folder and any other files one wants to preserve in case of errors.*

* obligatory reminder

[AZgl1800]

Alternately one could rename one's old home folder in the old /home partition whilst in the live environment, say append 'backup' to the folder; when installing, select the existing /home partition, configure the installer to use it as /home as one would to create a separate /home partition but do not select to format that partition. The installer will create a fresh folder for your user and the renamed old one will still be there on the same partition for you to access after the install if need be.

Of course one should always first create a backup of one's home folder and any other files one wants to preserve in case of errors.*

* obligatory reminder

Thank you for that hint, entered into my Notebook for the next learning session.

[srq2625]

Alternately one could rename one's old home folder in the old /home partition whilst in the live environment, say append 'backup' to the folder; when installing, select the existing /home parition, configure the installer to use it as /home as one would to create a seperate /home parition but do not select to format that partition. The installer will create a fresh folder for your user and the renamed old one will still be there on the same parition for you to access after the install if need be.

Of course one should always first create a backup of one's home folder and any other files one wants to preserve in case of errors.*

* obligatory reminder

This is the way I ALWAYS do a fresh install to replace an existing O/S. One of the last steps after testing the new install for stability is to copy/move important files/folders from the "old /home" to the new /home and then blow away the "old /home" folder.