How to clone a homeserver drive?

[humptydumpty]

Can I clone my homeserver drive the same way I do with my Windows machines using Macrium Reflect? If not, what's the easiest way to clone the drive without having to reinstall the server/apps?

Goal: to replace the drive with a larger capacity (I know that I will need to manually adjust the partition size; went thru the process with my VPS).

[robi]

Does Macrium work on Linux? Or bare metal?

[fbartels]

dd is the standard tool for these kind of cases. For it to work you should boot your server from some live medium (like a usb stick) and make sure that the volume is not mounted at while doing the copy.

[girish]

dd is my go to for this as well.

A very very very long time ago, in my first job, I used to use Norton Ghost for this It used to boot from a floppy.

[humptydumpty]

@robi the idea was to take out the drive and toss it in an external enclosure and do the cloning on a windows machine.

@girish @fbartels I’m not familiar with dd. I’ll have to look into it. Sounds like it’s command based. This will be fun lol.

[fbartels]

@humptydumpty if you need a bit more gui (altough dd is really really easy to use) then you could look at https://clonezilla.org/.

[humptydumpty]

@fbartels perfect! I was looking into dd and setting up/restoring Cloudron would have been easier for me. Also, I found out that Macrium doesn’t support LVM only GPT and MBR. Clonezilla supports LVM2. I know I’m using LVM but unsure which version, gotta find out first. Thanks for the help!

[girish]

@fbartels wow, that clonezilla even makes a reference to Norton Ghost

[fbartels]

@girish to be honest I was recently surprised that Clonezilla is still getting development. It probably has been decades since I last needed to use it.

[necrevistonnezr]

@fbartels said in How to clone a homeserver drive?:

dd is the standard tool for these kind of cases. For it to work you should boot your server from some live medium (like a usb stick) and make sure that the volume is not mounted at while doing the copy.

Wasn’t it that dd doesn’t really work well with drives of different sizes?