You can always have a partition for your data separate from your boot partition. Then you just mount that on any distro you run and you’re good to go. I have a drive from when I used Windows for media, and I’ve never reformatted it. Your distro doesn’t care where data came from, as long as it can read it.
Yeah, I need to switch it at some point, but it’s a 4TB HDD, and my other drives are smaller. I need to delete a bunch of stuff to be able to reformat it.
Depending on the amount of data, you might be able to shrink the existing NTFS partition, create a partition next to it of the proper filesystem type, move the data between the partitions, delete the NTFS partition, and expand the replacement.
But I wouldn’t attempt that on ant data you care about unless you have backups. I’ve done things like that a lot working in the tech industry, and sometimes things just break.
Makes it easy as a gamer. My only worry is all the wear from installing my games each time with the high cost of storage nowadays.
But it’s always nice to start from scratch with a new distro and not bringing any baggage with you.
You can always have a partition for your data separate from your boot partition. Then you just mount that on any distro you run and you’re good to go. I have a drive from when I used Windows for media, and I’ve never reformatted it. Your distro doesn’t care where data came from, as long as it can read it.
If you’re still using a data drive formatted as NTFS, and you’re not using Windows anymore, it’s best to change the filesystem.
Linux NTFS drivers are pretty good, but it’s still reverse engineering a proprietary filesystem. Sometimes it misbehaves.
If you’re using something like ExFAT then ignore me.
Yeah, I need to switch it at some point, but it’s a 4TB HDD, and my other drives are smaller. I need to delete a bunch of stuff to be able to reformat it.
Depending on the amount of data, you might be able to shrink the existing NTFS partition, create a partition next to it of the proper filesystem type, move the data between the partitions, delete the NTFS partition, and expand the replacement.
But I wouldn’t attempt that on ant data you care about unless you have backups. I’ve done things like that a lot working in the tech industry, and sometimes things just break.
So with hdd prices, not super tenable but i keep all my games on a 2nd drive formatted as ext4.