For my personal workstation, it's such a rare thing I always use that an excuse to start from scratch again. If it's like a business system or something, usually build a new system and migrate data and services to it gradually.

I so rarely do in-place upgrades of system drives unless it's a recovery or something.

Last time I did this I used btrfs.

Add the new drive to the system, create partitions, add the new volume and then remove the old one, btrfs moves all the blocks to the new drive.

The ESP partition is small enough and FAT- enough to just use cp.

btrfs device add /dev/newdrive /

btrfs device remove /dev/olddrive

disk destroyer? I prefer just formatting and rsync-ing things. Unless I care about preserving metadata.

Clonezilla Live USB ftw

Anything important is already stored elsewhere, so I just install clean.

Honestly dd is perfect. Like you say, shrink the partition down first, DD to the new disc, swap discs. That's it.

Reinstalling because I use ZFS.

I always use dd or ddrescue. Takes 20min to open the computer, connect the drives, boot from usb, copy everything and you'd be done. Also super easy. Just pay a lot of attention before hitting enter. One small mistake and you copy it the wrong way around. Or overwrite your old drive in some other way.

Adjust partition size if neccessary, then cp /dev/sda /dev/sdb.

I usually use Clonezilla and have it verify the data after cloning. It works for local drives, but it can also clone a drive over the network by running it on both the source and destination system, which is very useful for remote servers (eg moving a VPS to a different location).

rsync

Out of curiosity, what are you doing that the difference between the two is woth that effort? Or is the pcie3 drive bottom of the barrel maybe?

I use a decent cloning tool like foxclone, dd isn't really the right tool for that kind of thing IMO.

Gparted works great as well, just umount drive and copy

Same thing you suggested, plus a btrfs scrub to check integrity when finished. I suspect btrfs provides a more elegant mechanism for this, which I have been too lazy to look up.

I could never reinstall ... I end up customizing so extensively that a few years ago, I centralized all of my customizations in a VM image that I clone if I do need a fresh install.

Personally, when I get a new SSD I:

• Format as 4Kn (for 'Better' or 'Best' performance)
• Reinstall my preferred distro with a seperate home subvolume/partition (and tmp, var, etc. often with nodev,nosuid,noexec set)
• Copy my /home across, and parts of /etc.

There's a way to do it without shrinking the partition and dd until last used block.

I use this to copy my Linux setup for a nas down to a 4 gig ISO for redeploy.

Have to check my notes...

Edit: Checked Notes

#Use-case of fdisk taking the approach that fdisk is used, and assumption is your "sudo fdisk -l " produced:

Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0000e4b5

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 27 209920 83 Linux
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 27 525 4000768 5 Extended
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda5 27 353 2621440 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 353 405 416768 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 405 490 675840 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 490 525 282624 83 Linux

The two things you should take note of are

1. the unit size, and
2. the "End" column.

In this case you have cylinders that are equal to 8225280 Bytes. In the "End" column sda8 terminates at 525 (which is 525[units] * 16065 * 512 = ~4.3GB)

dd can do a lot of things, such as starting after an offset, or stopping after a specific number of blocks. We will do the latter using the count option in dd. The command would appear as follows:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/your_directory/image_name.iso bs=8225280 count=526

Where -bs is the block size (it is easiest to use the unit that fdisk uses, but any unit will do so long as the count option is declared in these units), and count is the number of units we want to copy Note that we increment the count by 1 to capture the last block).

Note to display units in cylinders: fdisk -l -u=cylinders /dev/sda Note for newbies of dd that of= can be a device you write to i.e. /dev/sdc, rather than a path to an iso image.

this is why i use lvm's.

i add the new drive to the lvm and afterwards remove the old drive from the lvm.