Colin23erk,
You can create a new home partition and move what is currently in your home to that; but it is not easy and there is no GUI method for doing that as far as I know. Here are two links describing the procedure if you want to have a look:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Movinghttp://www.howtogeek.com/116742/It might be better to just copy a few things from your current installation to a USB stick, then do a new install and make a separate partition for home with the new install. Then if you ever need to do this again, you can re-install only the system files and keep the home partition in tact.
Open file manager to your home; then do
View -> Show Hidden Files to show files and folders with names that begin with a period (.).
Copy/Paste the following to a USB stick:.config (folder with its contents)
.local (folder with its contents)
Copy/Paste these also if you use Firefox and Thunderbird:.mozilla (folder with its contents)
.thunderbird (folder with its contents)
If you see anything else that you
know you need (because you may have customized it yourself), save copies of those too. I'm not familiar with Wine or Skype, but if you use them and see config files (ones that begin with a period) for those, save them too. Only save things that you know you made customized settings for -- the new install will have normal config files for the programs too, so don't bother saving those.
Go through your Menu and make a list of additional programs you know you installed yourself to the basic system. Eg. If you installed Wine, Skype, another music player, etc., add them you your list.
To re-install, boot live DVD/USB and open the GParted partitioning program (
Menu -> System -> Partition Drives). Delete your Linux Lite root partition; keep the Swap partition unless you have decided to change its size or position on the disk. (If you want to delete Swap, you need to right-click it first and choose "Swapoff"; then it can be deleted.) Hit "
Apply" (arrow button beneath "Help") to carry out the deletions.
Now
create two new partitions in the resulting free space: one for
root and one for
home. If your home partition will not be used for storing data files, primarily just your configuration files, you don't need to make it very big -- so just make it 5GB. If you have room, make root 20GB. (You could probably get away with a 10GB root partition, but make it bigger if you can just in case.) Make each partition "
ext4 file system" type, and give each a label if you want to (no spaces in label name). Hit "
Apply" to make the partitions.
Once done making new partitions, run installer and choose "Something else" when you get to the "Installation Type" screen. The next screen will display all partitions on the drive. You will need to select the new LL partitions and set their mount points for installing. Click to highlight each one (one-at-a-time) and do the following:
- Click "Change" button (which pops-up a new window for the partition)
- "Use As" = ext4 file system
- "Mount Point" = / (for the root partition), and /home (for the home partition)
- "Size" = keep as you already set it in GParted
- "Format" check box = does not matter; you already formatted them in GParted. (If you made labels for partitions in GParted, formatting again will erase the labels. You can use GParted again later to label them again if you want to.)
- Don't bother doing anything with the data partition right now. You can add that after installation is done by following tutorial robert referred to here: https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/index.php?topic=203.0. Or just do whatever you did the last time to make links to it.
When you boot the newly installed system, perform updates first. Then take your list of additional programs you had installed yourself before and install them to the new system. After that, plug in your USB with the saved config files. If you use Firefox and Thunderbird, copy the ".mozilla" and ".thunderbird" folders from the USB and paste them in your home folder to replace the default files for them. Do the same for any other program config files you know you saved.
I would not recommend copying the full ".config" or ".local" folders into the new system. They might contain configs that bring back some of the problems you described before. If you run into a situation where you know you had special settings done in a program and the new install version is not using them; then look through those two saved folders to see if there are files specifically for that program. Copy what you find for it into the corresponding location in your home and restart the program to see if your prior settings are back.
Hope this helps. Good luck.