this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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I use Arch btw
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My arch install is from 2015. It just works, why should I reinstall?
@[email protected] mentioned cloning the drive and moving it to another computer. I imagine reinstalling would be easier at that point, that's why I asked.
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 nice one:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LVM
BTW some filesystems like btrfs and ZFS already have a similar functionality built in...
Thanks :)
And reinstalling the packages, moving over all the configs, setting up the partitions and moving the data over? (Not in this order, of course)
Cloning a drive would just require you to plug both the old and new to the same machine, boot up (probably from a live image to avoid issues), running a command and waiting until it finishes. Then maybe fixing up the fstab and reinstalling the bootloader, but those are things you need to do to install the system anyways.
I think the reason you'd want to reinstall is to save time, or get a clean slate without any past config mistakes you've already forgotten about, which I've done for that very reason, especially since it was still my first, and less experienced, install.