On the wiki there is a page about dd. The section 2.2 focuses on full disk cloning.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Can confirm this works. Just upgraded a 256 GB SSD to a 1TB one... and it was my OS disk... and it was LUKS encrypted. Everything is working fine (maybe even better).
You could also use clonezilla. The arch install media comes with it. It is handy, because you should not boot in the system you want to clone anyway. So you can boot into your arch install media and then do all the disk cloning.
Funnily I also have to do the same thing (from 1TB M.2 to 2TB M.2) on my desktop. I might do this tomorrow or on Sunday. I plan to do this as I described. Well I don't need to save a disk image on an external drive like you because I have two M.2 slots on my mother board.
Maybe write a follow up here how you did it and if everything went well?
Good luck!
Edit: Hey my first Lemmy comment! :)
+1 Clonezilla all the way...
dd is fine if you want an exact bit-by-bit duplication of all the bits on the drive, but, that's probably overkill.
Clonezilla (or, more accurately, the tools it runs) will only copy the useful stuff, boot sectors, partitions, files, etc... faster.
Welcome to Lemmy, glad you found your way to Archlinux :) I have ordered a USB case for my M.2.
Clonezilla is the way
I use Rescuezilla to clone disks for work. It’s clonezilla with a nice GUI and livecd environment. 😀
I just wanted to chime in to say that I used clonezilla today to move my 250G ssd to 1TB. It was easy and fast. I used ventoy (a usb iso loader) to load stable clonzilla live. I'll only mention the major options, which were disk-to-disk, expert mode, and then -k1 (to resize the partition accordingly.
The Arch wiki has some really good info on using dd for cloning. I've done it myself successfully with dd, but double and triple check to make sure your command is correct before continuing. Both drives would need to be connected to the same machine at the same time (new drive in a USB enclosure or in a spare PCIe slot)
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dd#Disk_cloning_and_restore
It might be worthwhile to check out GUI alternatives to dd if you feel more comfortable in a GUI vs terminal:
Thank you, would it not be possible to dump the cloned disk into a file? I don't have a second PCIe slot in my laptop... I was hoping to connect an external drive, dump the nvme, replace it, and restore it.
I've done something like that before with ddrescue though the example on the Arch wiki ddrescue page shows how to copy an entire drive to another drive. Here's how to backup to a file instead:
sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sda1 /path/to/backup.hdimage /path/to/backup.mapfile
But I'd reference the docs just to double-check: https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html
You might need to restore the image via Arch recovery mode with a bootable USB drive loaded with the Arch ISO however.
Can you clone from the nvme to the external drive then clone the external drive over to the new nvme once installed? If you have other stuff on the disk you can clone to a file but it will be a slower process:
dd if=/dev/sdX conv=sync,noerror bs=64K | gzip -c > /path/to/my-disk.image.gz
I recently did this on my desktop, and followed the instructions on the wiki
I used the rsync method and worked well for me.
You can replace a hard disk in a Linux computer without shutting it off or affecting any running programs by using LVM (Logical volume Management). There are some guides around for it but of course, it means being able to connect both disks to the machine at once.
Could work, but I migrated away from LVM to btrfs. With subvolumes and quota, I don't need LVM anymore.
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