Swapping out an old 2TB pcie 3 drive for a newer 2TB pcie 4 drive.
I was leaning towards using dd, after shrinking the partition on the source drive so it doesn’t also ‘copy’ all the empty space.
Have you done this recently? What was your method?
Or is there a CachyOS/kde tool I may be unaware of?
For my personal workstation, it’s such a rare thing I always use that an excuse to start from scratch again. If it’s like a business system or something, usually build a new system and migrate data and services to it gradually.
I so rarely do in-place upgrades of system drives unless it’s a recovery or something.
Pretty much this. I’d copy anything I want to keep onto a temporary drive, (cloud storage, a USB drive, second SSD, etc), then use it as an excuse to refresh my install. Then just copy everything from that temporary storage after my new install is finished.
True. Starting with a fresh install can be more of a performance boost than buying a new drive. Add them together though and your computer is going to feel like future tech. I’d also just reinstall, unless its a server or a pain to rebuild.
I’m about to do just that, but a bit overwhelmed. Over the many years of using Debian (not a heavy user though, only some slow progressing self host projects), there are many utilities or programmes I installed that I wouldn’t remember, is there an easy way to identify what is not “base” Debian and list them, so I’d reinstall them?
Last time I did this I used btrfs.
Add the new drive to the system, create partitions, add the new volume and then remove the old one, btrfs moves all the blocks to the new drive.
The ESP partition is small enough and FAT- enough to just use
cp.Huh.
I never thought of using that feature of btrfs that way. Brilliant.
Yeah, I think i’ll give this a go
I would add that a slightly better way would be to do it in raid1 mode instead of single mode.
That way you can move the data over by running a balance, instead of by removing the old volume, which would survive the process being interrupted by a reboot or whatever else.
Then after the balance you can remove the old volume and turn the new one back into a single volume.
btrfs device add /dev/newdrive /
btrfs device remove /dev/olddrive
disk destroyer? I prefer just formatting and
rsync-ing things. Unless I care about preserving metadata.rsync -aftwI usually use
rsync -avHXS --numeric-ids --progress --delete
Clonezilla Live USB ftw
Anything important is already stored elsewhere, so I just install clean.
Pretty much this… although I usually have at least a few moments of paranoia thinking about what I might be about to lose.
Honestly dd is perfect. Like you say, shrink the partition down first, DD to the new disc, swap discs. That’s it.
Adjust partition size if neccessary, then
cp /dev/sda /dev/sdb.Reinstalling because I use ZFS.
I always use dd or ddrescue. Takes 20min to open the computer, connect the drives, boot from usb, copy everything and you’d be done. Also super easy. Just pay a lot of attention before hitting enter. One small mistake and you copy it the wrong way around. Or overwrite your old drive in some other way.
I usually use Clonezilla and have it verify the data after cloning. It works for local drives, but it can also clone a drive over the network by running it on both the source and destination system, which is very useful for remote servers (eg moving a VPS to a different location).
rsync
Out of curiosity, what are you doing that the difference between the two is woth that effort? Or is the pcie3 drive bottom of the barrel maybe?
Yeah, exactly the latter. I noticed the other day that the thin copper layer that sits across the top of this drive had just popped off!
I have a bunch of scripts to install my systems. Anything important is already backed up to my storage system.
Do you use any fancy tools like Ansible or just a series of bash scripts?
For my laptop and desktop, it’s just a bash script. For my home-lab, it’s a config-management system that I built using bash scripts.
I use a decent cloning tool like foxclone, dd isn’t really the right tool for that kind of thing IMO.
