My recommendation would be to copy your entire home directory with rsync -a onto another (external) drive, as you anyway don’t want to modify your partitions without having a backup.
Then boot into a live distribution and open a partition editor, delete the home partition (the data on it will be lost), expand the root partition (/) onto the entire disk. Finally copy the backup back into the home folder using rsync -a
My recommendation would be to copy your entire home directory with rsync -a onto another (external) drive, as you anyway don’t want to modify your partitions without having a backup. Then boot into a live distribution and open a partition editor, delete the home partition (the data on it will be lost), expand the root partition (/) onto the entire disk. Finally copy the backup back into the home folder using rsync -a
Ok. Does rync -a copy hardlinks
No, only softlinks. See it’s man page. AfaIk, rsync -a is usually used for backup.