I’m looking to upgrade drives on two of my machines. My server running ubuntu has a 3.5" and will be getting a larger capacity HDD, while my personal computer running endeavor OS will be going from a 2.5" ssd to an nvme drive. (Not sure if it helps giving the drive types, but can’t hurt).
I’m fine with a clean install and reinstalling everything, but to save some time I’d of course like to minimize the effort that goes into it (importing settings etc). Any tips/tricks for either? Thanks in advance
Set up a proper backup system for your server. I like to use borg. Just to be safe, make a copy of your drive as well (like full disk rsync). Then do a clean install and restore as if your drive had failed. If your backups missed anything, you will now know and can fix your backup system and can still recover from your rsync’d drive.
You might also want to take this opportunity to start administering your server with code, like using ansible or other remote provisioning tools. This makes your system configuration reproducible so that you only really need to back up a few kinds of data like media files or databases.