Currently, my desktop computer has two storage devices attached: one 1TB NVME SSD, which has both Windows 10 and Linux Mint 21.2 installed on it (Each OS getting ~ 500 GB), and a 1TB SATA hard drive mostly used for Timeshift backups of the Linux Mint partition (Including my Home folder, for the record).

Later today I’m expecting to receive two more 1TB SSDs. When I’ve finished the upgrade process, I’d like to have my Linux Mint installation transferred to a RAID 1 array comprised of the two new drives and expand the Windows 10 partition to take up the whole existing SSD.

My current plan for doing this is to use my existing installation USB drive to install a fresh Linux Mint 21.1 installation on the two new drives, then use Timeshift to ‘restore’ my most recent backup from the existing installation. Is there a better way of going about this that I’m not already aware of?

  • @[email protected]English
    25•1 year ago

    Clonezilla local disk to local disk has worked well for me. It also automatically fixes GRUB and fstab so you don’t need to worry about those things. Boot params and such can get a bit hairy.

  • @Static_RocketEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    One argument against using DD is that sometimes the optimized default flags for FS creation change between kernel releases so its nice to take the opportunity when getting a new drive to reformat partitions. In addition to this, dd is slow if you haven’t completely filled up the partition because it doesn’t attempt to use fs metadata to seek sparse data on disk and instead copies all bytes of the partition. (Completely unnecessary and just causes extra wear on solid state medium)

    I use rsync instead of cp so I get verbose messages, hash checks, and resume functionality during large copies. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Rsync#File_system_cloning

  • falsem
    6•1 year ago

    Boot from a USB drive, then use DD to copy the entire disk over and resize the partitions if necessary.

    • @[email protected]
      1•1 year ago

      What if I want to clone an installation from a 2 TB drive (that is less than half full) to a 1 TB drive? Would I have to resize then dd?

    • lemmyvoreEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      dd + partition resize is a bit overkill. You can use cp -ax to copy at file level instead of disk level. Or, if you really want to clone the partition, using cat is faster than dd.

      dd can be fast if you experiment with and pick the right block size, but ofc doing that would take extra time.

      • falsem
        2•1 year ago

        You have to create and configure partitions and file systems if you do it at the file level. It also may not work if you’re using disk encryption. There’s a greater chance of having functional differences due to permissions, ownership, linking, etc doing things at the file level - though it SHOULD be fine but why bother if block device level is viable.

        Did not know cat could be used that way.

  • @anonono
    4•1 year ago

    it’s not the recommended way but it’s how I’ve been doing.

    you format the new drives and just cp -a -x from the running os to the destination, update the destination fstab, then treat the new drives as an os with a broken boot and continue from there.

      • @anonono
        2•1 year ago

        why not? sudo cp -ax foots the bill.

        I assume people prefer rsync because you may need to run it twice, but unless you tick all the boxes rsync won’t copy capabilities (see getcap /usr/bin/rsh)

        sudo cp -ax is short and sweet and does everything right.

          • t0m5k1
            6•1 year ago

            Man I always forget about dd and jump to gparted.

          • @anonono
            2•1 year ago

            dd is good if the destination disk is equal or bigger, unless you are brave enough to shrink the source partition.

            if you are moving to a smaller disk for whatever reason (hdd to sdd) then you need to fallback to a different method, which takes us back to cp/rsync.

          • Eager EagleEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            I’m always hesitant to use the “disk destroyer”, even as a regular user. rsync does a good job and it’s maybe even more agnostic than dd since it doesn’t really care about the partition size, as long as all data fits.

          • lemmyvoreEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            Because cat and cp are faster if you don’t pick a good block size for dd.

        • Eager EagleEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          rsync is also more reliable: in cases the transfer is interrupted it only transfers what’s missing and it can run the checksums making sure there were no transfer errors. I don’t see a good reason to use cp.

        • @[email protected]
          3•1 year ago

          You can only rsync a file system, you have to do the partioning beforehand. It does preserve all attributes though, if you use the right flags.

  • @[email protected]
    3•1 year ago

    I would go with clonezilla or dd. Always making a backup first. Do you have a tirth drive for it?