After plaguing this list for months about my ailing desktop PC I finally skipped it and bought a (basic) new one. It comes with 128GB SSD. It's fast of course but not very big. So here's the plan but any advice would be good...
I took the (almost new) 1TB drive out of the old PC and there's a lot of stuff on it. I've fitted it to the new machine but not installed anything yet as my ancient keyboard with a PS2 plug won't fit! Once that's sorted I'll install Mint. I *think* I'll do a standard install to the SSD and ignore the HDD.
My user data on the HDD is mostly in /home/phil/Nextcloud and it was synced to my Nextcloud server. I assume, hope, I can keep that synced data on the HDD and just link the directory to my new /home/phil/... Not sure if that means using the link as the Nextcloud directory when setting up the client or maybe Nextcloud will allow me to connect direct to the HDD. Either way though I'm hoping to avoid taking all day to sync my data across the network.
I remember long ago having a PC with 2 small HDD and setting it up with / on one but /home on the other. Is that still a thing? Is it worth doing in this case? Though bearing in mind it means formatting the HDD and re-syncing all the data.
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Phil
On 31/05/2022 20:10, Phil Thane wrote: [snip]
I remember long ago having a PC with 2 small HDD and setting it up with / on one but /home on the other. Is that still a thing?
It's easy enough to do. My server has / on one partition and /home on another.
My fstab reads something like this
#/ (root) UID=_ROOTs_UUID_ / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /home UUID=_HOMEs_UUID_ /home ext4 defaults
Obviously, your drive parameters, eg ext4 defaults may be different. Find the UUID by using command "blkid". NB I used the UUID returned by blkid, not the entry called "PARTUUID".
Also, understand that this will cause the computer to use the /home directory on the HDD not the SDD. If there are any files it's expecting on the SDD's home directory, then best to copy them to the HDD. e.g. if on installation, you added a new user "Bob", but didn't use to have a Bob, copy /home/bob from the SDD to the HDD. Also, I bet mate will have some config files it's expecting. Perhaps you should copy SDD's /home/phil and all subfolders to the HDD's /home/phil. Note however that there is a risk of overwriting crucial files doing this.
Is it worth doing in this case?
No idea! Sorry.
Though bearing in mind it means formatting the HDD and re-syncing all the data.
Does it? If you're sure you have backups, perhaps you could do this. *I THINK THIS WILL WORK* It's my understanding of how files are stored, but I could be wrong. Have an experiment with something trivial, or wait for someone to comment with "Steve you're talking BS!"
On the HDD, delete everything except the /home directory and sub directories. use the mv command to move everything in the /home directory to the "root" directory / something like (but do check) sudo mv /home/* /
Now I think that will be fairly quick. I think it will move the Information about the files (inodes) rather than the entire files themselves. There may be many thousand of entries to make, but much less data to transfer as the physical file not have to be copied on the disk.
Good luck!
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Phil Thane -
steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk