Easiest way to swap homedrive?

[famo]

I want to swap my /home which is on a separate drive (SATA SSD) for a bigger one.

What is the easiest and least problematic way to do so?
I see at least these steps:

1. Insert new drive
2. Format new drive
3. Copy data (preserving access permissions), how?
4. Edit fstab
5. Shutdown
6. Remove old drive
7. Boot…

Anything else/ suggestions?

[linux-aarhus]

There is no easy way - no shortcuts

• [root tip] Use systemd to mount ANY device
• [root tip] Move my home (content) to another partition
• [HowTo] bulletproof your personal effects (save your stuff!)

Over the years I developed a system of separate partitions and mount units and a few scripts. That system makes it a piece of cake to reinstall the system - in fact from I decide to reinstall until I am back in business - 10-15 minutes - give or take - never more than 30m.

[Aragorn]

See if this helps you…

Moving /home to second hdd

Welcome to the forum! First things first… Did you already create a new partition for /home on the other drive? If not, do so, and after you’ve created and formatted it, use lsblk to get the UUID of the partition. Alternatively, you can also set a LABEL in the filesystem upon creation, and use the LABEL in /etc/fstab, instead of the UUID. So long as the identifier for the partition is unique and persistent, which unfortunately the /dev/sd[alphabetic_char] designations are not …

[famo]

Thanks for the replies!

I used systemd approach to mount my other media disk. For my home disk I sticked to the fstab approach (for now) because it was easier to change in this kinda risky endeavor…

@Aragorn , regarding you tutorial:

Now, we’ll move over the contents of your current /home to the new partition…

mv /home/* /mnt/ && sync

I think it is really bad advice to use mv here, if something goes wrong during move you end up with a broken home. Whereas with copy (or rsync), you can always start over and delete the old folder after successful copy.

And for some reason the moving of data took way longer (like 3 or 4 times) under the rescue target then it took me in my DE. During that time I was sweating “my ass off”, because I didn’t know and couldn’t check what was going on…

So if you could change that to cp, I think it would be really perfect tutorial!

[Ben]

@famo

I think it is really bad advice to use mv here, if something goes wrong during move you end up with a broken home.

Maybe rsync -avh --progress would be nicer than mv - but I’d have another backup also.

[linux-aarhus]

If you assign the correct partition type uuids to your partitions then you won’t need fstab.

• Discoverable Partitions Specification

The partition most used types are

• /home partition is 0x8302
• / (root x64) is 0x8304
• efi is 0xEF00

[Hebgbs]

@linux-aarhus

no shortcuts

The system doesn’t give you shortcuts, but you can always make your own, as your post also demonstrated. It’s just, functional shortcuts without any shortcomings require technical expertise, and no software I know of beyond the firmware which is one’s mind can deliver that with time.