Moving my install

Hey EndeavourOS-forums!

Sorry if this is in the wrong section - I’m still kinda new to this platform heh

Anyway, tomorrow I (hopefully) have my new SSD arriving. Right now my system is installed on a pretty old 128GB SSD, and I was hoping for a clever way to basically move everything from this drive onto my new 1TB SSD.

I thought about keeping everything on this drive, and then keeping my games and what not on the new one - but I noticed with my current “warehouse” HDD, that some games won’t run from it. They HAVE to be on my system drive to run (Which is tricky with modern games and a 128gb SSD heh)

Do you guys know a way to move my stuff to the new SSD - or would I have to do a fresh install of EndeavourOS?

You can clone the root partition. Or you can restore a timeshift snapshot (and edit the fstab file).

Personally, I’d just do a fresh install. Save the list of installed packages with

pacman -Qqne > package_list.txt

and

pacman -Qqm > aur_list.txt

Then, on a fresh install, you can copy those two text files and install the packages with

sudo pacman -S --needed - < package_list.txt

And use yay to install all the AUR packages, one by one, manually, from the aur_list.txt.

You can just copy your home directory from a backup, this will preserve all the user space config files. You will need to manually configure some things like pacman mirror list, grub, cronie, etc, but that should not be too much of a problem. If you can think of what you did, you can backup those config files manually.

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Hmm yeah you’re probably right with the fresh install. How would I go about backing up my Plasma settings with themes and settings?

Hvala ti!

Just copy your entire home directory, including the hidden directories. All Plasma settings are there, inside ~/.config and ~/.local.

You should have a backup (preferably on an external drive) of your home directory regardless of doing a fresh install.

Thank you so much! I’ll get onto backup up right away!

Is there anything other than the home folder that would be good to backup?

It’s difficult to say. Typically backing up home and the package lists is enough, but it depends on what you did. If you’ve modified anything or added something outside home, you should back that up, of course, but only you know that.

Just make sure that your backup is good. The best thing would be to keep your old drive intact (and outside the computer) until you get everything working on the new drive.

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