Thank you all for your input. ultimately I discovered that the volumes that had been stored inside docker’s directory (on WSL) were actually not the ones I was worried about losing.

My container directory where my compose files are categorized and stored turned out to have everything I really needed. It did take reducing the hashed docker internal volumes to tar.gz to figure that out.

Anyway, I just stopped (not “down”) docker and copied the directory onto one of my extra SSDs. Then I shut down the host, took out the Windows nvme, booted from my Debian SSD, made and mounted a new master container directory, and copied the files over. I had to update the compose and config files to use the new file paths, but once that was done, I did a compose up and everything took off pretty much without a hitch.

I did some political stuff back in the day. We used to say “when people vote, democrats win.” I don’t need a win, I just need the fascist pedo kleptocratic octogenarian to lose.