On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 12:25:17PM -0600, Kent West wrote: > I have a Debian Stable box with two 1TB drives, set up as a mirrored RAID1 > setup. > > I have a replacement box with two 2TB drives. > > How do I best clone the old machine to the new, with minimal (or better, > no) downtime, being able to wind up with double the drive space on the new > box?
If minimizing downtime is your objective, then I would recommending doing a fresh install on the replacement system and rsyncing everything over. That lets you have the old system up and running until the very last moment. Of course, if you want a true clone (i.e., block for block disk image), then I would recommdend shutting down the old machine, plugging the old drives into the new machine, booting a live image, and then transferring everything from each old drive to its new counterpart with dd. Once the dd operations are complete, then you can either create new partitions to use the free space and then assemble the new pair of partitions into a new /dev/md? device that you can use. If you are also using LVM, then you add the new /dev/md? as a physical volume to your system's volume group. That way you would be able to create new logical volumes. Alternatively, you could resize the last partition on each disk to take advantage of the additional space. However, the suitability of that approach depends on your current partition scheme. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez
