Reinstalling and keeping your home partition

Whether you have your Manjaro installation with a separate home partition or not, the most secure way to keep your data between reinstallations is to save it on a backup drive. Before reinstalling, update your backup, and after this, restore it as it was. There is only one potential issue – if your old and new users have different UIDs and/or usernames, you might need to use chown after restoring to avoid potential ownership issues. (We reviewed chown’s usage in Chapters 7, 10, and 13.) However, if they have the same name and were the first user to be registered for the OS during installation, both will have a UID 1000, so there will be no issue.

You must have your home directory on a separate partition to avoid the backup and restore steps. If this is not your case, first follow the instructions in the earlier subsection of this chapter, Moving home to a separate partition.

During installation, Manjaro copies a set of...