Clone hard drive VS New installation

Hello everyone!
I explain to you; I currently have a physical server in production for 3 years. It has a 1Tb hard disk installed (yes, I took it because it was only to “play” a bit and, in the end, it remained an indispensable element in our home network) in which I have basically everything installed (nextcloud, mail, asterisk , webserver, ovpn …). And, of course, with a 1 Tb disk and 3 years of information, it is filling up.

My question is: what is better in my case? Clone the hard drive to a bigger one? Or do a clean installation on a larger capacity disk and recover the system with the backup copies I have?
I would be grateful if you enlightened me a bit in the process, since I would not want to lose any information (especially photos and videos of my wife and my son :wink:).
Thank you all for your help.

Greetings,
Jon

Local disk to disk cloning with something like clonezilla is faster than the “reinstall from backup way”, it worked here recently with a NethServer vmware VM that I cloned to proxmox.

You can always fallback to restore from backup if cloning makes problems.

There’s also the option to add the new drive and move the NethServer data /var/lib/nethserver there.

The data should be safe because in any case you still got the working old drive and backups.

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I think I’d favor “fresh install and restore from backup”, assuming everything you’ve done is through “normal” Nethserver methods (i.e., no custom software that doesn’t come from standard Nethserver repos, etc.). The reason is that, as you say, you have important data there. And while you can (and should) back up your data, having hard drive redundancy is a good thing as well. Therefore, I’d recommend installing to a suitably-sized (I’d probably say 4-6 TB, but you’re likely a better judge than I of your needs) pair of disks, and the installer will mirror them. Then restore, continue your regular backups, and your data should be much safer.

What might improve safety further would be to install Proxmox on that server on a ZFS mirrored pair of disks, then install Neth on that. The additional benefit is the data integrity protection ZFS provides–sadly RedHat/CentOS are allergic to ZFS.

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What would be the “cleanest” thing? Can’t cloning everything to a larger disk cause problems? If not, I would opt for this option.

How can I do it safely? The truth is that I am quite new to Linux, I am learning it with NethServer and I do not want to write the wrong command.

It is what I have in mind to do, but for this option I want to wait a while, since I also want to update the processor of my G1610T to a Xeon and increase the RAM.

Again, thank you both for everything

The cleanest thing is the reinstall and restore from backup method as the backup does only cover files in use by Nethserver so the new system is kind of cleaned up.

Adding a new disk can be done with the server manager.

In “Storage” choose the new disk and add a partition and format it.

As mount point set “default” so the new drive is mounted on /run/media/root/drivename

In this example we move the shared folders to the new drive:

mv -f /var/lib/nethserver/ibay/* /run/media/root/drivename/

After moving has finished, the drive can be unmounted from the default mountpoint and the mountpoint set to custom mountpoint /var/lib/nethserver/ibay and to “mount at boot”.

Now the shares should be available at default path /var/lib/nethserver/ibay but they are on the newly added drive.

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Definitely, this is what I am going to do when I change the processor and the ram, I will add 3 4Tb disks and mount a RAID 5.

For now, I will make a fix adding the hard disk as you have told me. Thanks for the steps @mrmarkuz and for your help @danb35
Next week I will try to put the new hard disk. Take care guys!

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