Best practices for transferring an existing Linux installation from one drive to another?
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?
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.
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)
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.
ddcan be fast if you experiment with and pick the right block size, but ofc doing that would take extra time.
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.
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.
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.