As almost everyone I was very excited when SSDs became mainstream and after some time somehow I ended up having four of them. Those were installed on different machines and although their sizes were relatively all right for the time, right now it was not that great. Three of them were 250G and one was 128G.
The fact that one of the big ones was used for a dual boot Win/Linux made just things worse. It also had 7 partitions...
My linux root had about 100G and my home was on the 128G one. That was incovenient as I was very often exceeding 90% usage and had to clean up stuff. And I wasn't even using the Win 10 installation as I had a clean one installed on a different 250G drive.
The 7 partition disk reminded me of the Gentoo days. At that time I was following the really nice docs and building KDE libs on a Pentium 3 which was taking an insane amount of time. But that's a topic for a different day.
This time all I wanted to do was to put my linux installation on a single 250G drive and ending up with a spare 250G drive ... yes, the one with the 7 partitions.
I didn't want to do a clean install as I was pretty happy with the state of my linux.
After some digging I found that people seemed to recommend using rsync for
this sort of thing, which made sense as the sizes of the partitions would be differnet. I guess there
are other alternatives to this, like using dedicated software or maybe dd and expanding the paritions after.
What I was planning to do was something like:
And it actually worked. The only thing that errored was the swapfile but after recreating it, it was ok.
It was quite nice having ~200G being copied in about 17-20mins.
I did this in other cases and never had an issue with the data so now that some time has passed I'm confident enough that this approach is all right.
