Hi all. I’m currently running a home server using Ubuntu OS, but I’d like to try and explore other options for operating systems to better my skills with linux/unix.

Currently I’m considering switching to Fedora server (though feedback is welcome) because I’ve been running it as my daily OS for a few months now and I quite like it. I’m also looking at Debian server because that’s what my old professor used and he did nothing but speak its praises.

Only issue is I’m concerned about data loss from moving the installation. Currently, the server is setup to run several Docker images running my programs. While moving over the images shouldn’t be difficult whatsoever, I’m afraid my storage setup might not be so easy. Currently, it’s two 4TB hard drives running in a logical volume. I’d love to simply be able to move over all the files to a backup drive, but I don’t have anywhere I can store >5TB of files as a backup.

I googled around, but I couldn’t find too many guides on migrating logical volumes. The one or two I did find were most definitely written for someone with far more linux knowledge than I have as a relative noob, so any advice would be extremely welcome!

  • kboy101222@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
    2·
    13 hours ago

    Sorry this took a while, I got distracted. Trying to also learn Dart cause why not.

    Here’s the output of lsblk

    NAME                      MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda                         8:0    0  3.6T  0 disk 
├─sda1                      8:1    0    1G  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2                      8:2    0    2G  0 part /boot
└─sda3                      8:3    0  3.6T  0 part 
  └─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv 252:0    0  7.3T  0 lvm  /
sdb                         8:16   0  3.6T  0 disk 
└─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv   252:0    0  7.3T  0 lvm  /
    • harsh3466@lemmy.ml
      1·
      4 hours ago

      Perfect. So you’ve got separate /boot and /boot/efi partitions, which means dual booting will be much easier if you want to do that.

      The ubuntu--vg-ubuntu-lv is the logical volume you’ll want to resize. So now we need to see how much space is available on the volume. To get that, run the command sudo df -h and paste that output into a comment.

      From there we can figure out how much space you have and how you might want to resize the volume to prep for a new install.

      What is challenging about this is that your data is under your root (/) mount, which is also the ubuntu os. If in the end you want to entirely remove ubuntu, it’ll be a little trickier than if your data was in a separate logical volume that you mounted into your root system during boot.

      For example many people have a separate logical volume for /home, which makes it easier to switch distros while preserving your home folder with all of your user data, config files, etc…

      But that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves. Start with sudo df -h for the filesystem usage info and we can go from there.