Is it possible to reinstall Linux (or distro hop) without losing my Dropbox install? Could I move the Dropbox install to my home folder so it survives the OS install?

  • giacomo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    6·
    11 hours ago

    i thought Dropbox was some sort of cloud storage thing. couldn’t you just mount it on whatever distros you wanted?

      • Goku@lemmy.world
        1·
        5 hours ago

        It’s possible if you configure your /home/ to use a separate partition. But you would have to do that in advance. Even in that case you’d have to reinstall it but the nice thing about it is you won’t have to reconfigure anything. It will be able to get all your previous settings from your home dir.

        You could backup your home dir before reinstalling then copy it over after for the same effect.

    • Horsey@lemmy.worldOP
      11·
      10 hours ago

      Yes, lol. Long story short,I don’t have the password because it’s a shared account

      • Badabinski@kbin.earth
        18·
        10 hours ago

        This is the most important piece of information. You should edit the post and/or title to make this more clear.

      • davidgro@lemmy.world
        12·
        10 hours ago

        Well, that makes a huge difference to the meaning of the question.

        I don’t know, but maybe the login is held in a dotfile such as ~/.dropbox or maybe in ~/.config/dropbox or similar, and just backing up that (not to Dropbox!) would be enough to restore being logged in on a different system.

      • KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz
        3·
        8 hours ago

        Ah ok. So its not so much the current files that you want to retain, but the ability to receive files locally through sync, when someone else elsewhere makes a change?

        Sounds a bit like not wanting to remove the Netflix app because its logged in with the unknown password of an ex.

  • aarch0x40@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    12 hours ago

    It is of course possible but you’d likely be causing a big mess on the filesystem. If you’re able to move the install into a home directory, why not just archive what you need and restore it after reinstall? This would be the cleaner way to go about it.