IMPORTANT Before any re-installation make sure the **3-2-1 Rule of Backup ** is respected:

• create 3 copies of your data (1 primary copy and 2 backups)
• store your copies in at least 2 types of storage media (local drive, network share/NAS, external HDD, dedicated USB etc.)
• store 1 of these copies offsite (in the Cloud)

Personally I also have a separate USB stick for scans and electronic versions of my most important documents on top of that.

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Keys that might come handy during installation (laptop-dependable):

• F12 for selecting boot device
• Esc for entering OS choice menu (GRUB etc.)
• Enter to get into the BIOS menu

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General installation steps (not considering dual boot at the moment):

1. Download an ISO iamge of the Linux distribution of choice
2. Create a USB boot stick with this image
3. Boot from the USB stick (press F12 during the reboot if not booted from it automatically, though boot order can be configured in BIOS)
4. Partition the hard drive in a preferred manner (see some options below)

Partitioning options:

1. one partition to rule them all:

• yay> easy to install

• nay> requires making a backup of any data to be preserved on an external partition or storage medium

2. (a) separate partitions for /home and /, or
3. (b) separate partition just for the data, /home and / on a same different partition

• yay> no need to physically copy the files, data is not touched during the OS (re)installation

• nay> will need to decide how much space to allocate to each partition

As of 2020 my current Linux Mint 19.3 takes ~14G freshly-installed, so I am using ~220G for data and ~30G for the OS, implementing the 2.(b) partitioning scenario.

There is a tutorial on how to create a separate partition for data for Linux Mint, my own adaptations are:

• to get the separate partition for data during the installation step 4 I just create an unallocated chunk of space and leave it be as unused space
• and then I use GParted to create a special data partition from it from the newly-installed OS