I’m looking to upgrade drives on two of my machines. My server running ubuntu has a 3.5" and will be getting a larger capacity HDD, while my personal computer running endeavor OS will be going from a 2.5" ssd to an nvme drive. (Not sure if it helps giving the drive types, but can’t hurt).
I’m fine with a clean install and reinstalling everything, but to save some time I’d of course like to minimize the effort that goes into it (importing settings etc). Any tips/tricks for either? Thanks in advance
If you don’t want to reinstall the OS, you can probably use Clonezilla: https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone
Maybe you need to update the drive ids for your bootloader (grub) afterwards, not sure about that.
Edit: Maybe the advanced “-g auto” option does that for you.
This is looking like a good option, thanks!
Try Foxclone. I prefer it over Clonezilla.
Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.
You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.
I dont know if this would be applicable for your use case.
But in gentoo one of the recommended ways to backup your system is rsync. Rsync is single threaded, but keeps all softlinks and hardlinks aswell as accepting an eclude list for directorys you want rsync to ignore. I have recovered from some pretty big dumb dumb moments and have used rsync to build packages on my threadripper and syncing them to lower power devices like my laptop and raspi. And they work pretty well!
If you do decide to go with rsync you can use “rsync -aP (from directory) (to directory)” the “a” stands for archive this keeps all permissons, softlinks and hardlinks. The P stands for a progress bar, so you can see how its going. Another benefit of rsync is you can start copying and stop and start and it will only SYNC over what isnt new or modified. After the files are synced over you need to edit your fstab (its af file where you computer mounts your disks) and grub-mk-config. If not re-install grub
Hope this helps
That does help. One of the things on my to do list was setting up a backup system anyway, so maybe I’ll play with that. Thanks!
I just do clean installs anymore not a lot to do with Linux as vs Windows, Linux takes me like 30 mins to setup as vs Windows can take hours.
