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If those personal photos and videos are important to you, you should have them backed up anyway. If you ever spill anything on that laptop, or it gets dropped or broken or lost. All those things are gone.
But as others have said, you can sometimes resize a partition from gparted if the drive isnt mounted (ie, use the live USB).
The personal stuff is backed up to Google Drive so if the laptop dies, nothing happens to them.
I will give g parted a shot too.
You won't go very far with 25 GB, especially with backups enabled. Get a new drive or delete other stuff you have on it.
I have been deleting stuff for a long time. It is Windows plus very basic apps at this stage. It is a cheap laptop so I don’t want to replace the drive.
If you boot off the thumbdrive to the live OS, you can use Gparted to resize the partition. I'm not sure what Mint has for syncing Google Drive, but I'm sure it has something. Worse case, absolutely worse case you could use rsync. That should really not be necessary though. Gnome has an online accounts area and you setup your online drives there like Google Drive and OneDrive and all that. I've never used Mint before but, Mate or Cinnamon probably have something similar. I'd be shocked if they didn't.
Thanks for the info!
I meant rclone. You might be able to do it with rsync too, but rclone is the one I was thinking of. I actually setup my own self hosted Nextcloud server. Then I used rclone to sync everything from gdrive and onedrive to my Nextcloud servers block storage. Then I just use rclone, scheduled on a cronjob, to back up that block storage to storj.io. Anyways, worse case scenario, with rclone, you got something.
I will take a look at rclone too.
using "GNOME Online Accounts" you should be able to access Drive files through your default file manager. I'm not sure if you can automatically sync them for offline access.
Also, I could probably reformat the entire laptop if I could only figure out how to replace the Google Drive for sync backup for roughly 15 GB of personal photos and videos.
If by replace you mean find a non-Google alternative that will work fine under Linux (or Windows, Mac iOS/Android), you may want to check Filen (affiliate link this matters to your specific requirements, read further).
What is Filen? It's a small German company which offers cloud with end-to-end (zero knowledge) encryption, aka what's considered best practice security and privacy-wise. They don't offer as much features as Google or other big cloud providers, it's a really small company, and their apps are kinda on the rougher edge of things but they work fine. The one real drawback for photos backups on mobile is that it's not fully automated (one needs to start the app for it to start copying the pictures) but it works fine on Mint (fellow Mint user here) ;)
By the default, their free plan is 10GB which is not enough for you but if you use my affiliate link, or anyone's else, you double that free plan to 20GB (it's a one time extra, you can't stack them up but it's really free for you to keep and use). Also, if you ever decide to upgrade to a paid plan, you would keep your free storage as an extra bonus. Finally, once you created an account (a free one is enough), you should be able to share your own affiliate link and that could get you up to max 30GB more free storage, making it a total of 50GB free storage. Disclaimer: I'm a paid user of Filen.
You may also want to consider Ente.io which is another encrypted service focusing this time only on photos. It works real well but you only get 5GB free. Since I barely do any photo myself, that was not my priority but had it be, I would have seriously considered using them (and one of their paid plans) ;)
Thoughts?
Like already mentioned if you care about your photos, or any other file, make backups (no need to use that company's services (even though they work nice) it's just a fine explanation of what a good backup strategy should be).
Thanks! I will check these guys out too.
You're welcome. Hope you will enjoy Mint ;)
Installed mint onto a 125gb ssd. I have it set for boot ~1gb, root 50gb, swap 8gb, and home everything else.
I do find I'm running low on my root drive, but that's because I had a few failed installs of stable diffusion.
Yeah, the computer’s main use is a printer at this stage and the printer connected to Mint fine. I could probably make the switch as long as the printer works…
You're learning, if this isn't a permanent install just install everything but swap under / (root). It'll be fine and you'll nuke this soon anyway rendering partitions irrelevant. Just put it all in one partition, it's not going to catch on fire.
I like this idea. Zero partitions and presumably 30GB shared with dual boot into Windows and Mint. I need to read up on this one.
I feel like I read somewhere recently (because I was troubleshooting some issues that turned out to be a bad stick of ram) that 50GB is the minimum for Mint. Or at least the recommended minimum for a root partition.
Your can download zipped photos from Google, but I'd be a bit surprised if they don't have a Linux app for syncing that.
I am reading that Google Drive doesn’t have a native Linux app but there are plenty of alternatives and ways to make it work. I guess I will try that as my first option or alternatively offload it all on to a USB stick and transfer it. I could look at sync options as well.
That's weird to me when they need a Linux app for Chromebooks. How much different can it be? But I haven't looked into it really. I'm trying to reduce the footprint of Google in my life.
Somewhere in the install process I read 15 GB for Mint and ran with it. It works but nothing can be upgraded.