[arch-general] System manipulation

[David Rosenstrauch]

On 10/11/21 9:51 AM, pete via arch-general wrote:
> Hi Folks
> 
> Found myself with a rather awkward situation my / partition has only got 5%
> free i need to enlarge it somewhat i have another drive i can throw at the job
> my question is how do i go about moving "/" to another drive  i have looked but
> cant find an answer i do not really want to do a complete reinstall as i have
> so much extra software installed some of which has been a real pain to get
> working  .
> 
> Any help please
> 
> 
> Pete .

One strategy that you might want to consider that I've used before and 
has helped many times, is to not move the entire root filesystem, but 
rather, just pieces of it.  For example, on my system, /home, /var, and 
/usr/local/share all reside on different volumes.  That frees up a lot 
of space on the root partition.

Couple of other suggestions:

1) If you do decide to take my suggestion above, best way to do it (IMO) 
is to drop to system rescue mode (best to not copy /home while you're 
logged in) tar up the sub-dir, un-tar it onto the other device, then 
delete it off of the root fs.  (Best to make sure the data all got 
copied over correctly before you delete it.)  Then, after you've 
verified all looks good, change your fstab to mount the new device.

2) You might want to consider using LVM 
(https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/LVM) going forward.  If you have 
/home, /var, etc. on other devices, then those dirs are the only ones 
likely to need significant more space going forward, while your root fs 
isn't likely to grow much.  If you use LVM, you can just throw some 
additional disk space from the VG to /home whenever you need more space 
there.  (Or even add new disks.)

HTH,

DR