I bought a new ssd that is way faster and larger than my current one. What is the best way to transfer everything from my old drive to my new one. Currently running Fedora 38, fine with the command line. If nothing else I will just do a clean install on the new drive and copy over what I need from /home on the old drive.
Clonezilla https://clonezilla.org/
^ Yeah I second this. Make a bootable flash drive with clonezilla on it, boot from that, and clone your original disk to the new SSD
Some prefer CloneZilla, some prefer Acronis, the idea is the same though.
Just don’t forget to expand your volumes once you’re done cloning
Add to this: I once used clonezilla to clone boot drive with LUKS partition and let clonezilla handle partition table.
The LUKS partition expanded, but what’s under LUKS partition is bugged (keeps it’s initial size, but there is no free space in LUKS container), I have to use gparted in a live system to fix it.
Look at Clonezilla. It’s a specialized Linux distro that does some interesting things, including cloning.
When I tried it I found it confusing and didn’t feel like figuring it out at the time so I just did a clean install ahaha. YMMV.
Clonezilla is an awesome tool. If you have doubts about the procedure test it out in a virtual machine. Testing in VMs will save you so much grief.
You could just use the “dd” command. Example: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb status=progress # In this example, sda is the source drive and sdb is the destination…
I like ddrescue for almost every case I would use dd :)
What I did when I migrated from an HDD to an SSD was booting from an USB life image and then simply
dd’ing the HDD to the SSD and afterwards extending the partition and file system (the partition on the end is for my/homeso extending was easily possible).I like to do clean installs to un-crust my setups, but I have simply dd’d one disk to another and the only issue I came up with was that the old fstab used UUIDs to refer to the disks, and those changed when I got the new disk, so at first boot nothing would mount. Hahahaha.
Oops I meant to reply to @halo5@lemmy.world
It depends on what partitions are there. Boot partitions and other gpt/uefi stuff likely needs to be cloned exactly. For my system, the root partition uses lvm2 so I can just attach a new drive, add it to the group and migrate the extents over. This makes it easy to move data live without needing to unmount the main partition. The uefi/boot stuff usually is easy to unmount without worrying about what is running.
cp /dev/sdX /dev/sdY. Really, it’s that simple, just replace sdX and sdY with the device files for the source and destination drives.
