[clug] Moving the contents of / to a new filesystem on Ubuntu?

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010, Michael Still wrote:

> Is there a nice tool in Ubuntu which will support moving the contents of / to 
> this file system without a reinstall? I could do it manually, but its fiddly 
> to do while remote from the machine, which I will be for the next 10 days.

Hi Michael.  If you boot off a live cdrom you can move data around, 
repartition & remap the bootloader with a minimum of pain.  You'll just 
need someone close to the system (remote hands) to pop the cdrom in and 
out as required.

Dump & tar are both fine tools to move the data.   Dump has a bit of a bad 
name in the Linux world but it is fine on filesystems that are not being 
actively written to.

I would stay away from dd.  In this context it is normally used to move 
filesystems not files.  This is a very rigid way of moving the data around 
and adds complication.  Eg if you put it on a larger partition you will 
need to grew the filesystem.  If you put it on a smaller partition you 
would need to shrink it, which might not even be feasible.

Cheers,

Rob

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