Hey everyone I need to reinstall OpenSUSE 11.4 with KDE Desktop on my HP Pavilion Desktop and I was wondering if it is possible to do so without losing my data, and no backups? I can’t back up my data for reasons I’m not
going to go into so I need to know if I’ll lose my files…there isn’t anything truly important…just stuff that’d be mildly irritating to lose…thanks and have a nice day.
If you have separate root partition you should not lose data (although YMMV 
)
Just be careful not to format /home and other partitions.
If you have any mysql data that will be in /; so you first need to use mysqldump to make a copy to your /home partition which you can restore when you have reinstalled openSUSE. BTW I have been reinstalling openSUSE that way ever since it got a separate /home partition and the only problem (not a disastrous one) I had was when mysql changed its detault language.
On 08/25/2011 08:46 AM, AgoristTeen1994 wrote:
> is possible to do so without losing my data, and no backups?
yes it is possible, but it as also possible for you to lose all the
data during the install if you format your existing /home (whether in a
separate partition, or not); or if you have data stored in directories
not inside your /home; or while you are reading this post from me…
during install, you must pay particular attention to the partitioning
solution offered by the install script…and, if you don’t understand
partitioning you probably should become familiar with it before
beginning…because, it is VERY possible to screw it up if you just “try
something” without understanding the consequences of your click…
since is no assurance that any digital data on any electronic device
will persist more than momentarily it is up to you to solve the barriers
to backing up because only multiple, geo-diverse copies provides a high
probability of continued data availability…
on the other hand, non-digital data applied to cave walls tens of
thousands of years ago continue to be usable, see http://tinyurl.com/3bm8y5h
–
DD Caveat
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobile” of operating systems!
Backup mysql and /srv is you have a webserver running.
During the partitioning stage of the install, look for “import mountpoints”, make sure /home does not get formatted. With these three things secured you should be fine.
As far as I can see no one so far mentioned in bold print that doing a new install keeping the /home directory requires that the /home directory is on a separate partition. If this condition is fulfilled the OP may go ahead and should be very careful to check all settings during the partitioning stage, making sure that the /home partition is not formatted. Doing so requires to know which partition this is. Any error will lead to complete data loss.
Okay thanks for all over the information everyone.