Hello,
I have never tried any of the migration tools you listed, so can't advise on their use. But regarding your first option of doing a backup, reformatting from btrfs to a different filesystem, restoring the backup and proceeding with the upgrade with a non-official tool: you might as well do a clean install of the new OS (whichever you choose) instead, then restore your backup. >From my understanding, RHEL derivatives are not designed for automatic upgrade >between major versions, they expect you to backup your /home and do a clean >install. The justification is that they have very long support (the >earlier-than-originally-planned end of life of CentOS is a consequence of >recent policy changes since IBM bought Red Hat, and hopefully only an >outlier), so you only rarely need to do this tedious clean install and porting >of your old configuration. Debian, on the other hand, is designed to handle upgrades between major versions (I would still do a backup before attempting this) and smoothly migrate configuration, so maybe this is the OS you want from now on. Backing up data is not too difficult (but check your backups). Configuration is more difficult, especially because defaults change between versions, so the configuration files you back up are not guaranteed to play well with the new system. It is tedious to have to configure a freshly installed OS, but on the other hand the really critical pieces of configuration are often not that many, and you might be better off porting them to a freshly installed system than trying to keep your old configuration files in place during an upgrade. I hope this helps, Guillaume ________________________________ From: CCP4 bulletin board <CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK> on behalf of Fred Vellieux <frederic.velli...@lf1.cuni.cz> Sent: Friday, August 18, 2023 10:43:34 AM To: CCP4BB@JISCMAIL.AC.UK Subject: [ccp4bb] CentOS 7 end of life (july 2024) Hi, Other people on this BB may run into the same problem. CentOS 7 end of life is announced to happen in July 2024. I have to migrate my Linux box to another Linux "flavour". I've had a look at the possibilities: - migrate to another RHEL (rpm-based) Linux, with "elevate-linux" and "leapp". Here on this Linux box the problem I have is that the disk partition mounted as / uses btrfs. btrfs has been deprecated starting at versions 8 (RHEL8, CentOS 8, Alma etc). This means first to copy all that is present on / somewhere, change the file system (for example to ext4) and restore everything. - migrate to Debian, that supports btrfs. There are utilities, "debtakeover" and "debootstrap" that are supposed to install Debian 8.11 (jessie). Has anyone performed such a migration without data loss (files, pathways, configurations)? If so I'd like to know what was successful. Thank you. Fred. -- MedChem, 1st F. Medicine, Charles University BIOCEV, Vestec, Czech Republic ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB<http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB>, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk<http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk>, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/ VARNING: Klicka inte på länkar och öppna inte bilagor om du inte känner igen avsändaren och vet att innehållet är säkert. CAUTION: Do not click on links or open attachments unless you recognise the sender and know the content is safe. När du har kontakt med oss på Uppsala universitet med e-post så innebär det att vi behandlar dina personuppgifter. För att läsa mer om hur vi gör det kan du läsa här: http://www.uu.se/om-uu/dataskydd-personuppgifter/ E-mailing Uppsala University means that we will process your personal data. For more information on how this is performed, please read here: http://www.uu.se/en/about-uu/data-protection-policy ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the CCP4BB list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/WA-JISC.exe?SUBED1=CCP4BB&A=1 This message was issued to members of www.jiscmail.ac.uk/CCP4BB, a mailing list hosted by www.jiscmail.ac.uk, terms & conditions are available at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/policyandsecurity/
