hang-the-9 :
What are you loading on the drive that is taking up space? Just the OS and even some programs like Open Office will not take up 32gb of space.
And yes moving files to an SD card will be a lot slower than off the local storage.
thanks. i don't know what is taking up all that space on the hard drive. i use firefox with addons , opera with addons , timeshift (which is set to put backups on the microsd), gparted, libre writer, and not much else other than vlc sometimes. tor browser is still on there,
in trying to get the microsd persistently recognized, techsupport folks have had me sudo apt-get update to Fetch the list of available updates then sudo apt-get upgrade to Strictly upgrade current packages and some other terminal commands.
what are the steps to install new os , like lubuntu , while maintaining /home contents ? i'm thinking i'd keep the /home on the 16gb flash drive as a backup so i'd reformat the primary partition of the 32gb emmc internal hard drive, partition as 22gb for primary partition, 10gb for /home . then, how to copy that /home backup to that 10gb partition so the new lubuntu os sees that mountpoint so programs use those settings and configurations to properly load stuff like the opera addons like lastpass , etc ?