My Objective:
Repurpose an obsolete OS Filesystem as pure data storage, removing both the stuff only relevant for the OS and simplifying the directory structure so I don’t have to navigate to <mount point>/home/<username>/<Data folders like Videos, Documents etc.>.

I’m tight on money and can’t get an additional drive right now, so I’d prefer an in-place solution, if that is feasible. “It’s not, just make do with what you have until you can upgrade” is a valid answer.

Technical context:

I’ve got two disks, one being a (slightly ancient) 2TB HDD with an Ubuntu installation (Ext4), the second a much newer 1TB SSD with a newer Nobara installation. I initially dual-booted them to try if I like Nobara and have the option to go back if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason.

I have grown so fond of Nobara that it has become my daily driver (not to mention booting from an SSD is so much faster) and intend to ditch my Ubuntu installation to use the HDD as additional data storage instead. However, I’d prefer not to throw away all the data that’s still on there.

I realise the best solution would be to get an additional (larger) drive. I have a spare slot in my case and definitely want to do that at some point, but right now, money is a bit of a constraint, so I’m curious if it’s possible and feasible to do so in-place.

Particularly, I have different files are spread across different users because I created a lot of single-purpose-users for stuff like university, private files, gaming, other recreational things that I’d now like to consolidate. As mentioned in the objective, I’d prefer to have, say, one directory /Documents, one /Game Files, one /Videos etc. on the secondary drive, accessible from my primary OS.

Approaches I’ve thought of:

  1. Manually create the various directories directly in the filesystem root directory of the second drive, move the stuff there, eventually delete the OS files, user configs and such once I’m sure I didn’t miss anything
  2. Create a separate /data directory on the second drive so I’m not directly working in the root directory in case that causes issues, create the directories in there instead, then proceed as above
  3. Create a dedicated user on the second OS to ensure it all happens in the user space and have a single home directory with only the stuff I later want to migrate
  4. Give up and wait until I can afford the new drive

Any thoughts?

  • @Deckweiss
    15•5 months ago

    I feel like you are overthinking this.

    Option 1 is what I would do. Seems very straight forward. And additionally:

    Moving files around or deleting files is a very quick operation, because the filesystem will only edit the “metadata” and not have to copy the whole file bit by bit to a different disk.

    Maybe delete the OS files first (everything except /home). So it’s not cluttered from the start. Then copy stuff from /home/user/stuff to /

    Take special attention to the /boot partition. I don’t know which drive the bootloader for your nobora os is installed. It may have been automatically put together with your Ubuntu to your HDD.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•5 months ago

      I feel like you are overthinking this

      Yes, most certainly, but given my own inexperience I figured I’d rather overthink than fuck up because I didn’t know about some detail.

      Take special attention to the /boot partition. I don’t know which drive the bootloader for your nobora os is installed. It may have been automatically put together with your Ubuntu to your HDD.

      Fairly sure the boot partition is on the new SSD, but I’ll check and leave it untouched if I’m not sure.

      Thanks for your advice!