Swapping HDD with SSD Fresh reinstall, save current settings?

[smittylube]

I have e Dell E5500 with dreadfully slow 2g processor and 2g ram and an old hdd.

I have 4g ram and a new SSD to install.

I loaded ubuntu a few days back got a pretty good feel for it. Found a couple of programs I use and all works well. Loaded up a theme and such.

I don’t have any real files that I need to save, but would like it to be where I am now just minus the dual boot with win7.

I burned a dvd with the 18.4. ISO to install so I’ll reuse this.

Should I save/ copy/ backup my entire .home file system to a thumb drive, swap drive and then restore from backup?

thanks for the help and all the fun.

Steve

[oldfred]

Your /home is all your data, unless you also have separate data partitions. Is your /home inside / (root) or a separate partition?
You can also export a list of installed apps, to make it easy to reinstall.
Only if you made some system setting changes, may you also want /etc. But if new install is different version or different system, you may not want to just restore as settings may be different.

This is a good time to test your backup procedures as you still have old install to go back and get anything you missed.
discussion of alternatives/strategy backups
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2368992&p=13677224#post13677224
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CategoryBackupRecovery
(https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CategoryBackupRecovery)
Best practice for Backups - theFu
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2368992
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2389631&p=13757986#post13757986
More backup info from 1clue
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2377810
Discussion of issues on rsync bash file & rdiff-backup - TheFu
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2392127
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2224428
http://www.kirya.net/articles/backups-using-rdiff-backup/

Oldfred's list of stuff to backup May 2011 (still mostly current, see added links below):
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1748541
Adding extra commands to rsync
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2260658
More detail on /etc files and others to backup - post #3:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1500559
Some files(temp, cache etc) to exclude from /home backup - post #8 by Paddy Landau
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1883834
http://askubuntu.com/questions/545655/backup-your-home-directory-with-rsync-and-skip-useless-folders



(https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CategoryBackupRecovery)