[talk] OpenBSD disk cloning

[Okan Demirmen]

On Sat 2023.07.08 at 17:14 -0400, Robert Menes wrote:
> This might be a doable solution, but I do have another question to go along
> with this, because I don't want to play guesswork with what's currently
> installed on my system and what I have to reinstall on the new drive.
> 
> Do OpenBSD's pkg utilities (pkg_add, pkg_info, etc.) have an option to
> output to a file a list of all installed packages? IIRC dpkg on Debian, or
> its apt tools, have an option you can pass into them to dump out a whole
> list of installed packages to a text file, which can be read back in on a
> new system to install all the same packages back in again. Everything else
> like custom configuration and such can easily be put onto a USB stick and
> migrated over, or I can put them into a private GitHub repo, clone it into
> the new machine, and put everything into place.

Yes, and there's even an FAQ for that.

> On Sat, Jul 8, 2023, 12:34 jpb <jpb at jimby.name> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 06:09:53 -0400
> > Robert Menes <viewtiful.icchan at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Hey everyone,
> > >
> > > I'm switching the SSD in my OpenBSD laptop out for a larger one, from
> > > 128GB to 1TB.
> > >
> > > Currently, my OpenBSD install is the normal default partition setup,
> > > but I also want to grow /usr/local and /home to take advantage of the
> > > added space. I'm on OpenBSD 7.3 and also encrypted my volume at
> > > install.
> > >
> > > So, threefold problem:
> > >
> > > 1) What is a fast, easy way to quickly copy all the existing
> > > partitions to the new drive, and
> > > 2) Should I prepare disk encryption first, before cloning the existing
> > > partitions, and
> > > 3) I've looked at Clonezilla for 1) but have to consider also growing
> > > the partitions I want to grow afterwards; Clonezilla AFAIK doesn't do
> > > partition resizing.
> > >
> > > What are some solutions or ideas that anyone has that would allow me
> > > to even do all this from within OpenBSD itself? This will also be a
> > > good learning method to do more with OpenBSD as well!
> > >
> > > Thanks, everyone!
> > >
> > > --Robert
> >
> > Hi Robert,
> >
> > I'm old school, so take this with a grain of (old) salt.
> >
> > I normally manage two machines for just this scenario.  When I need to
> > update, I prepare the other ("new") machine:
> >
> >  * with the latest OS, repartitioning as part of the base install
> >  * install the same packages/ports (includes all dependencies)
> >  * copy any user data from old to new, usually using rsync which you
> >    can find in the packages repo (see
> >    https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq15.html#Intro)
> >  * after that, i test for a day or two, then just use the new system,
> >    putting the old system aside until the next update.
> >
> > This way is more expensive, but it's also very reliable in that if
> > anything breaks with the new install or package updates, I can just
> > continue using the current system until any issues are resolved.
> >
> > Hope this helps,
> > Jim B.
> >
> >

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