Hey everyone, I’ve been giving difft. distributions a few tests here and there - I liked the concept of Silverblue but i’m a noob (kinda) that has a year of messing up every day over my belt. With that said, I’m aiming to switch from my current setup with Fedora Silverblue over to Rocky Linux and don’t quite know where to start. Can anyone help me with this? It’s noteworthy - I’m using Gnome boxes, that’s actually where I store my “.pem” AWS keys for a few production workloads. Gnome Boxes seems to have issues with thumb drives (when I select options for boxes to share files w/ main silverblue OS), so I don’t know how to get those “.pem” keys off - at this juncture, it might even be worht just redoing everything - including the websites - so long as I can get to a functioning position where I can start scaling a business and Rocky seems like the way to go int his regard - so any advice to keep my current folders and files plus .pem keys would be great, but i’m to the point hwere I’d basically just delete everything and do everything from scratch if it came down to it.
Why so complicated?
Why not just run Fedora (Workstation or Silverblue - doesn’t matter), and store your certificates and keys in your home directory?
And then, as with every system, have a backup of your home directory?
You can run whatever distro in a virtual machine, if you delete the machine, your key is gone, no matter what distro it was.
If you have a backup of your home directory, you also have a backup of your virtual machine that has the certificate.
So, the solution seems to be backup of personal data, not the choice or change of distro.
reference: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/accidentally-deleted-gnome-box/76858
I suppose it’s partly - perhaps even mostly - ignorance… lack of general knowledge and direction as to how these distributions work and how one can move across them, not to mention how files and directories are stored and saved across updates and upgrades - even things as elementar as a backup at this point.
What do you suggest as the best method for backing everything up? The external hard drives that I’ve come across are only compatible with Windows and Mac and today is the day where no matter what - i need to make the move; thumb drives work I suppose but I don’t want to rely on something that I could lose; I thought I had some backup app but I must be confusing that with the Ubuntu VM - and even then, where these backups are technically stored is unclear. The IBM backup storage guide that Fedora News had posted went ahead and guided me to nowhere fast (again as a noob). There were many layers when I first got into all of this with relatively no background or roadmap for how to begin the learning curve.
Long way of saying, I don’t really know. At this juncture, any softawre recommendatinos for backups - that a fifth grader or even younger child could understand - would be greatly apprecaited! 
I’d effectively like to have all .pem keys in my VMs that run Ubuntu, all files and folders across users on my main OS (Sivlerblue) to be backed up, saved, then I can migrate over to Rocky Linux. I’m no longer in a position where I can take time to learn this stuff anymore - and I have to stick to revenue generating X - meaning even if I put socks on it’s because i’m going into a meeting afterwards to generate revenue. I know this isn’t popular, but I need to shift mindsets to only be on my computer for business purposes moving forward - as I’ve put myself in a terrible position trying to navigate these unsettled waters - and I have to remove all bottlenecks/roadblocks. Fedora is fantastic and it’s a roadblock; without going into the paradoxes that I’ve found myself battling, it’s time to just simply move to Rocky.
Any software, dumbed down guides, tips etc. to get from A-Z on this would be awesome! Video tutorials are amazing and if there are video tutorials like how Fireship explains things in 60 seconds - but they have several 60 second explanations that are interdependent and follow a clear path - then that’d be amazing. Thanks, Augenauf!
I do have Gnome Disks installed - I’ve definitely used Deja Dup Backups on both Fedora and the Ubuntu VMs. Pika Backup sounds familiar - maybe someone had recommended this before? Synology Cloud Station Backp isn’t something I’ve seen before - but all that to say, I’m hopnig to solicit your feedback on the best backup system and any references with best practices would be great to have indexed as well!
Seems nobody gave a good answer. This is a very old topic, but the local GNOME Boxes, or virt-manager can access your USB sticks. Its just the Flatpak that has the issues