Steam On Linux Shows A Wild Swing Back Up For March 2025 : linux

[+] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Yes two drives is much better than using the same drive to dual boot. However be aware that windows update will at some point break the Linux install even if installed on a second drive. There's a few steps you can take to avoid this like making sure the boot partition and booy manager ate both on the Linux only drive but Microsoft messing something up is an inevitability.

If on a laptop with only one drive, you could boot to a USB drive or USB external enclosure for an SSD.

Ideally, you should back up all data to an external drive which is only plugged in during backups (unplug when installing another os). I would even recommend windows users booting into clonezilla and cloning their windows drive as it is really easy to overwrite or format the wrong drive.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

It'll depend on the laptop of course but I did this a few years back by putting a M.2 drive in a spare slot my laptop had.

[–] drangus 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You can copy them to a thumb drive or huck them in the cloud, install Linux, and then copy them over. There’s a few other ways if that doesn’t work for you.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That works thank you.

I was kinda hoping to have like a shared folder both systems could access but I figure that's to hard

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not at all. Personally I like to have a shared data partition for my media files. Both OSes can use that just fine, if it's NTFS or exFAT formatted.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Cool, I'll look into it, cheers

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What kind of files are you wanting to keep?

You can partition or preferably install a second drive and install Linux on that. You can then access your files on the other drive/partition and connect your Steam library to your existing library without any issues*. Want to go back to Windows? Just boot into it and your updated files will be there.

*Only thing is you'll need to either disable fast boot on Windows or shut down by using the restart option or else the Windows drive is locked to read only.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Word documents photos videos and such. Basically all the sbitbive hoarded over the years that i don't want to get rid of by accident

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Any way to do that other than backing them up to another machine/USB drive is too risky IMO.