💾 Archived View for ser1.net › post › moving-homes.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 17:39:58. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I put an extra SSD in my computer and moved $HOME onto it. It went surprisingly smoothly, thanks to btrfs, and I'm writing it down here for Future Sean, because that guy can't remember *anything*.
Here were the basic steps: first, make the destination partition on the drive. In my case, this was `/dev/sda1`. Then do some btrfs magic:
mkfs.btrfs -L drivelabel /dev/sda1 mkdir /media/drivelabel mount -t btrfs /dev/sda1 /media/drivelabel btrfs subvolume snapshot -r /media/home btrfs send /media/home | btrfs receive /media/drivelabel btrfs property set -f /media/drivelabel/home ro false
That last point bit me and required a couple of extra reboots. I had read about it, but it got lost in all the moving around. Finally, update `/etc/fstab` to mount the new subvolume. This can be with the label using the `LABEL=` argument, but for the UUID, call `blkid -s UUID /dev/sda1`. Don't forget the subvolume:
UUID=bff4d27c-3fce-4d75-8b08-420b29fe50b8 /home btrfs subvol=/home,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd 0 0
Reboot, and Bob's your uncle. The part I haven't gotten around to is deleting the old `/@home` and snapshot. Mainly, because that disk is only 17% full, and I don't need the space, and it makes me feel a little better having it around. The only thing I lost through this was a little time, and about a dozen lines in my zsh history after the snapshot.
In oelden days, I'd have rsync'd home, but thar be monsters. It's easily to do wrong. The Mistakes I made during this process only resulted in a couple of extra reboots, which was an improvement.
Oh: once you do that force-set of the write bit on the snapshot copy, it (apparently) breaks the link.