My advice, for what it’s worth, is to not dual boot with windoze. Three reasons:
Loss of privacy and security benefits that Linux provides (as windoze can read and modify any data on Linux partitions without user consent, unless the drive is encrypted)
Increased complexity of the system (making system maintenance and troubleshooting more complex than it needs to be).
Slower learning of Linux due to temptation to do tasks in windoze which can be done in Linux.
You don’t need windoze. You just think that you do.
I will also add, that if you use a Windows file system such as NTFS in Linux you risk losing your data on the drive completely. I had 2 NTFS drives become so badly corrupted when used in Linux that the corruption could not be corrected in Windows or Linux.
The first time the corruption was unrecoverable from I figured it was a “one off”, as that had never happened before. The second time it happened I formatted all my NTFS drives to Ext4, and I refuse to use NTFS any longer.
Fortunately I am careful about backups, so I did not lose any essential data when the NTFS drives melted down. So, you better get good at using data recovery software if you use NTFS with Linux, because you’re going to need those skills when NTFS corrupts irrecoverably (and it will).
All this is true… but don’t scare users like that! To lose data on modern solid-state or hard drives, you still need to work hard! Well, a lot of people use dual boot Windows and Linux, and I think this is a good example of freedom of choice in different life situations. I ask you to pay a little more attention to this on your forums, especially to restoring the GRUB bootloader after reinstalling Windows. Otherwise, after this I begin to pervert in various ways, including restoring a previously backed up disk image with the Clonezilla boot disk installed by Garuda. Thank you I wish you well!
The OP asked for advice on dual boot, and I gave him the best advice I could, according to my conscience and to the best of my knowledge. That advice is simply: don’t dual boot. I provided three reasons why I think that.
Of course, the OP is free to do whatever he thinks is best, whether to take this advice or not.
Solid state drives definitely have a far lower failure rate compared to mechanical drives. Unfortunately, the negative aspect of SSD’s is they are extremely hard to recover data from. Solid state drives have a great reputation for reliability, but even they can suffer premature failure. A brand new SSD literally melted down inside my sons tower computer. As smoke started coming from the computer I quickly pulled the plug before the thing had the time to catch on fire. So, please don’t tell me SSD’s are bulletproof, because it was fortunate I was home or the whole house could have gone up in smoke. Oh ya, that was on a Windows machine BTW.
NTFS drives can be corrupted quite easily in Linux, especially if you download movies or music that contain non-standard characters that Windows doesn’t support. Fat32 formatted drives can be easily corrupted if you attempt to transfer an ISO or movie onto it over 4 GB in size. You really don’t need to try that hard to break either antiquated Windows file system.
It’s actually pretty easy to corrupt Windows formatted drives if you use them in Linux regularly. Of course most times the corrupted drive can be corrected by using ntfsfix or with the Windows check disk utility. If you think I’m telling stories search the forum for posts containing “NTFS”. You will find a lot of recent posts where the NTFS drive couldn’t be mounted in Linux because of file corruption problems. Usually, the file corruption can be corrected, but not always. There’s the rub, if the drive corruption can’t be corrected you just lost all your data.
We don’t recommend our users dual boot with Windows. It is our prerogative to decide what we support on our forum. Dual booting with Windows is considered unsupported on our distro. Feel free to do whatever you chose on your own machine. However, if you insist on running Windows with Garuda and your system breaks - you broke it, you bought it. We provide a perfectly tuned Arch experience out of the box, and if you mess it up by running a dual boot that’s on you.
Look at it this way buddy. You buy a brand new automobile with a gas engine. You go home and then think, hey I should have bought a hybrid. I mean, two engines is better than one, right. So you proceed to installing a battery assist drive train to lower your fuel costs. Well guess what the dealership would say when you broke your vehicle and tried to get it fixed under the manufacturers warranty. They’d laugh you out of their service garage for doing something so stupid to a brand new car that was running great when they sold it to you.
We provide a finely tuned high performance Linux experience. You want to break it by dual booting, go ahead and fill your boots. Just don’t come crying to us if things go sideways.
It should go without saying, all important data should be backed up.
All hardware will eventually fail, SSDs, HDDs, everything. Everything that is not backed up will eventually get lost. This is only a matter of time.
The backup of really important data should be
external, i.e. not connected to the computer (except when taking or restoring backup)
redundant, i.e. multiple copies independent of each other
resistant to being overwritten by updated or corrupted data, ideally incremental backup that allows to restore the history of each file, or at least detect a corrupted file before it overwrites the previous backup.
If you ever need to do data recovery on a damaged hardware, or because some important data has been accidentally deleted, that only means that your backup solution failed.
There is important data that should never change. Family photos and videos, scanned legal documents, medical records, music, works of literature, etc… This data should be backed up only once, then checked whether it is correctly copied, and never touched again. Specifically, it should never be overwritten. A read only medium like DVD is great for this type of backup, as long as it is kept in a good climate. Of course, this backup also has to be redundant (multiple copies).
There is also important data that is prone to changes. The only way to be sure it is not corrupted is to store incremental backup, so you can be sure you can reconstruct the entire history of changes. Then, when a corruption is noticed, one can always go to a previous version. Software like Borg is great for this.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. There are many cheap SSDs that have a relatively short lifespan. Buying established brands that cost a few bucks more makes perfect sense here. Similarly, the failure rates of almost all manufacturers, regardless of price, have increased in recent years, especially for very large HDDs. Sometimes they don’t last 3 years.
Samsung, for example, has also had problems with various batches of its SSDs, but I only buy Samsung or Intel SSDs. For HDDs, I currently stick to a maximum capacity of 4TB and only buy drives that use CMR. Drives with SMR simply have too high a failure rate. Professional information on failure rates of HDDs and SSDs can be found at Drive Stats - backblaze.com
The major problem with SSD’s is, unlike mechanical drives they have no real warning signs before they die. Usually spinners, you can tell they’re approaching end of days when they start becoming noisy. At least you normally have time to copy all important data to another drive before they give up the ghost.
We are now very offtopic, but of course you are right @tbg
We have the written terrabytes and the wear level as a rough guide, but it’s usually not the memory chips but the controllers that stretch their wings.
Greetings! Thank you for such a detailed explanation of your views on a possible problem with modern drives when used in Linux systems! Indeed, sometimes I rarely have some partitions not mounted on hard drives, but with the help of testing utilities I was very quickly able to get them into working condition on both Linux and Windows systems. Nevertheless, the information received from you is quite valuable to me both in the cognitive and practical sense when working in Linux! Thank you! I wish you goodness and peace!
I think he meant with WSL installed, which is always a risk, coz you never know with Windoze what is actually installed or enabled (meaning not user-facing)…it’s proprietary after all.
