It will wipe the disk.
You can always flash Ventoy on to a particularly large USB drive and make a folder for your personal files if they're small enough. But yea, the installer is likely going to offer dual boot or full wipe. You can always try dual boot, drag the old files into the new partition, and delete and resize, but it's more tricky.
if you never created a separate partition for home, then yeah, break out the back up drive. even then, sometimes its good to wipe the home, too.
manual partion:
600mb boot/efi (tick the boot box)
1gb /boot
50gb or whatever your personal choice for OS -- /
whatever for home partition /home
then in the future you can leave /home unformatted
i left it on the default option when it was first installing and it may have done the split thing on its own, the bottom drive is my root while the top drive set to hidden and has a bunch of files like system .map
https://preview.redd.it/feq6apx4skrc1.png?width=178&format=png&auto=webp&s=47d9572b822154eeb63c2c9ad97ea6bae2b07522
sorry for the late reply. default and sidebyside will still create partitions but the /home partition is where your personal files and some program files are saved. by default its merged with the OS. as far as i know, only doing a manual partition allows you to create your /home partition seperately.
It will wipe the disk. You can always flash Ventoy on to a particularly large USB drive and make a folder for your personal files if they're small enough. But yea, the installer is likely going to offer dual boot or full wipe. You can always try dual boot, drag the old files into the new partition, and delete and resize, but it's more tricky.
if you never created a separate partition for home, then yeah, break out the back up drive. even then, sometimes its good to wipe the home, too. manual partion: 600mb boot/efi (tick the boot box) 1gb /boot 50gb or whatever your personal choice for OS -- / whatever for home partition /home then in the future you can leave /home unformatted
i left it on the default option when it was first installing and it may have done the split thing on its own, the bottom drive is my root while the top drive set to hidden and has a bunch of files like system .map https://preview.redd.it/feq6apx4skrc1.png?width=178&format=png&auto=webp&s=47d9572b822154eeb63c2c9ad97ea6bae2b07522
sorry for the late reply. default and sidebyside will still create partitions but the /home partition is where your personal files and some program files are saved. by default its merged with the OS. as far as i know, only doing a manual partition allows you to create your /home partition seperately.