Looking for Feedback on my Migration Plan
Firstly, how much of a risk is there that Linux corrupts my backup NTFS drive if I read from it to copy my data over to a newly formatted EXT4 Hard Drive Disk?
I'm currently on Windows 10 and looking to migrate to Bazzite (or Nobara if Bazzite doesn't quite work well enough for me as I've heard it might be slightly better). I built my current desktop computer back in 2020 with hardware recommendations from a friend and didn't have Linux in mind because I didn't think it would support gaming well enough for me. Consequently, I have an AMD processor but NVidia graphics card because that's what I was familiar with on my old gaming laptop.
I have an SSD that windows is installed on, a 3.63 TB Hard Disk Drive that I bought new when building my pc, and a 931 GB hard disk drive from my previous laptop that had died. Since I haven't used all of the space on any of my drives, I was able to backup all the data from the HDDs to a portable 3.63 TB Hard Disk Drive, along with most of my Users directory from my SSD.
Ideally, I'd like to eventually cut the umbilical cord and go full linux, but I want to give myself wiggle room to boot up my Windows 10 if I find myself needing it for something like job application documents that won't load or playing a multiplayer game with friends that won't work on Linux. Consequently, I plan to do a dual boot, but I want to be as safe as possible, so I've ordered another SSD for installing linux onto rather than trying to partition my current one.
While I'm waiting for that SSD to arrive/fully commit to a distro, I plan to boot Bazzite from a USB drive. Since space will be limited on the USB however, and I currently store most of my steam library on my HDD anyway, I'd like to convert at least my larger HDD to EXT4 so I can try to continue using it for my steam library while running Bazzite. I want to keep all the data on it, however.
My original thought was to try to partition the larger HDD since I have 1.14 TB free on it, and gradually convert the files by moving from the NTFS partition to the EXT4 partition. In the migration articles on the wiki for this sub, however, I saw the suggestion was to just backup to an external drive (which I've already done), format the original drive to EXT4, and then move the data over from the backup drive.
I'm considering this approach, but I want to double check the risk of messing up the back up drive in doing so, as it's currently the only backup of my data that I have.