VM on linux question

I searched and can’t find it, but it’s awkward to work in a search.

Anyway, can I run a VM of the distro I’m running on the host machine and move my actual /home directory to the VM virtual drive? I want to do some things that could be destructive to the OS and thought it would be much better to test in a virtual environment.

I get that software linking would be a pita because I store everything on a seperate partition, but as long as I could get the environment and everything up and running, I would be willing to go through and deal with those issues.

Why move home instead of doing a copy? Your home could permanently ruined if you cant recover from whatever shenanigans you are attempting.

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I mean copy.

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There are a number of ways to get the data there; you can really just treat it like moving files over a network.

rsync -rv /home/hostuser/* guestuser@guestip (replace user names, etc) on the host should work. you can try 9p, nfs, or samba for direct access (not copying).