There’s a reason you have a home dir. Just copy that forward along with whatever other config files you might’ve customized.

This is probably the reason why most distros will have the home directory on a separate partition. To easily allow you to keep your most important data when reinstalling or switching to a new distro.

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This might help in the future in case you setup a remote mount for backups in the future. Look into using systemd’s automount feature. If the mount suddenly fails then it will instead create an unwritable directory in its place. This prevents your rsync from erroneously writing data to your root partition instead.