Alt text: O’RLY? generated book cover with a donkey, navy blue accent, header: “It’s only free if you don’t value your time”, title: “Handling Arch Linux Failures”, subtitle: “Mom, please cancel my today’s agenda!”
Alt text: O’RLY? generated book cover with a donkey, navy blue accent, header: “It’s only free if you don’t value your time”, title: “Handling Arch Linux Failures”, subtitle: “Mom, please cancel my today’s agenda!”
Well not really, cloning is much easier than reinstalling and then configuring everything again…
I have LVM set up from the start, so usually I just copy the /boot partition to the new disk, and the rest is in a LVM volume group, so I just use pvmove from old disk to the new one, fix the bootloader and fstab UUIDs, and Im ready to reboot from new disk, while I didnt even left my running system, no live USB needed or anything. (Of course I messed it up a first few times, so had to fix from a live OS).
But once you know all the quirks, I can be up and ready on a new drive withing 20mins (depends mainly on the pvmove), with all the stuff preserved and set
That’s really cool, how can I learn more about LVM and that kinda stuff?
There is many tutorials and how tos, this is quite a detailed one: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-lvm-to-manage-storage-devices-on-ubuntu-18-04
But it doesnt cover some of the more advanced stuff, like snapshoting, mirroring, drive replacement and many other functions which LVM provides. You can search for those online, there is a pletora of examples, which would fit your use case…
BTW some filesystems like btrfs and ZFS already have a similar functionality built in…
Thanks :)