‘removed from public access, but retained for our own or for legal purposes’

yea, they do.

g.skill was probably just the ‘easy target’ for the legal vultures.

even with all ‘legit’ sources for everything wordpress-related, maintaining it is a PITA–which is why i send anyone who asks me about wp to their own hosting service. i don’t wanna deal with that shit.

you don’t need “everything”… and if you did, you’d perhaps also need to recreate the entire working windows environment. so make full hdd backup image to satisfy that requirement—or, don’t reformat and reuse the drive, just pull it as-is for safekeeping–executing a full shutdown first: shutdown /s /t 0

as far as the user files go… this is the basics of what i do (migrations for home users is about half of my workload):

copy user libraries (the default locations windows saves your files to) for each user account:

robocopy c:\users(windowsuserprofiledir) d:(destinationonexternal) /e /dcopy:t /copy:dt /xjd /xa:sh /xd appdata /r:1 /w:1 /mt:2

put each user’s files into their own destination directory.

use care when backing up directories linked to or taken-over by cloud services (looking at you, onedrive). make sure the files copied actually exist on the destination drive.

export bookmarks and saved passwords from every browser and browser profile from each windows user account.

backup steam or its directories for later restoration, if wanted.

save mailstores from local mail clients. not many home users run a mail client with local stores anymore. the windows-only free-to-use (but not foss) ‘mailstore home’ in portable mode run off an external might be useful (yes, it can run in a vm later if needed). don’t forget to jot down mail server configs.

check ‘public’ and other places for stray files.

optionally, backup browser profile directories, zip 'em up (fastest compression is enough). if you restore entire profiles, you might preserve more of the browser environment… but chromium ones will still choke on logins, so having password exports is critically important. most people are fine with just having bookmarks and passwords migrated–which are easily backed up, and normally what i restore instead of entire profiles (unless it’s firefox to firefox, and windows to windows).

make sure you know the credentials for and can login to important sites and services from a different pc or a private window without leaning on saved sessions in existing browsers on the current windows pc.

if there’s something else specifically that you want to save, like a wallpaper that you don’t have the original source file for… a quick web search will likely reveal its location.

my flatpaks and appimages consume a hell of a lot more space than silverblue itself (which is essentially just a ‘browser launcher’ with an appstore ‘out-of-the-box’).

(and then there’s the data, which uses even more)

it really depends on what demands you are going to place upon the system…

gaming? have weird hardware? you’re gonna visit a command line and have to ‘research’ things…

but just basic tasks and well-supported hardware? many can give a mostly or even entirely ‘point and click’ experience.

i have a number of users on silverblue and endless that would be terrified if they ever had to open a terminal, and i rarely open a terminal on my own desktops (xfce manjaro, cinnamint, endless, silverblue)

we’re safe from that particular method here in the boonies. we’re lucky to even have one tower from any provider within range anywhere around here.

i know that big magic box in the food room has more.

the twin cities doesn’t have a ‘chinatown’ or a ‘little italy’–they have little canada

that’s when the two scales collide…

-40FC…

‘fucking cold’

it’s your fault. you’re the one that left the best part on top.

you have a bright future ahead of you in for-profit food service at public schools. the only thing missing is the taco sauce ketchup.

i had the spindle adapter to put on a stack of 45s, and also a simple disc that fit down it and just allowed one to sit on the turntable at a time. i didnt’ need to use these snap-in adapters.

it looks like cachyos just makes available anything in arch’s repos that worked for them at that time.

any upgrade or update can ‘break’ something.

mint does have an upgrade path from one major version to the next. the upgrade tool might not be available immediately upon the release of the next version, but in your case it has been around awhile.

https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/upgrade-to-mint-22.html

backups are, of course, your responsibility, as is any unexpected manual customizations or software added from outside mint repositories.

both. and all your friends and ‘friends’, too.

i have a couple dozen older systems sitting around here, mostly 2nd to 4th gen–a few newer, a few older. that i cannot even give away. i’m gonna end up binning all but the ‘best’ 5 or 6 this spring when the recycle truck makes its annual trek here.

throw it up on ebay, get most or all your ‘investment’ back. just make it the cheapest comparable BIN.

the “real id” marked state id and dl also do, but have also been ignored by the police state.

people have proved their status or citizenship only to be assaulted and detained anyway…

so, FUCK OFF.