Your files and storage

Your home folder works exactly as you expect. What is different is where everything else lives — and why an update can never take your data with it.

Where things are

What	Where it lives
Your files and settings	`/home/<you>` — on the writable data partition
Installed Flatpak apps	`/var/lib/flatpak`
System configuration you changed	The writable layer over `/etc`
The operating system	The read-only system image

The first three are on one growable partition that updates never touch. The last is replaced wholesale by every update.

Disk space

The data partition expands to fill the physical disk the first time the system boots, so a 2 TB drive gives you nearly 2 TB for your files regardless of the image being 17 GiB.

The two system slots are a fixed cost — the current image and the previous one. That is the price of one-step rollback, and it does not grow over time.

To see what is using space:

immos ~$

$ df -h /
$ df -h /var
$ flatpak uninstall --unused

flatpak uninstall --unused is usually the biggest easy win — it removes runtime platforms that no installed app still needs.

External drives and network shares

USB drives, SD cards and phones mount normally in Dolphin. Network shares work through Dolphin’s location bar — smb://server/share for Windows and Samba shares, sftp://host over SSH. These are handled by the file manager itself rather than being mounted system-wide, which is why they need no configuration.

Backups

Immutability protects the system, not your data. Two things follow:

A rollback will not recover a deleted document. Rollback moves system images; your files are outside that mechanism entirely, which is the point.
You still need backups. Install a backup tool from Discover — Déjà Dup and Pika Backup both work well — and point it at your home folder.

Because your data is confined to one partition, backing up /home genuinely does capture everything personal about the machine. The system half is reproducible from a download.

Factory reset

Reinstalling is rarely the answer on Immos, since the system cannot degrade. If you do want a clean start, writing a fresh image over the disk resets everything; the system half is identical either way.

Note that wiping the data partition also removes the file search index, which the desktop simply rebuilds on the next login.