How to swap/change the existing uSD card in HA to a larger card?

[misa1515]

Hello,
HA was installed on a 32GB uSD card (RPi 4).
Subsequently in HA installed programs and set up integrations.
Now system is working.

How can I quickly and easily swap an existing 32GB uSD card (standard) to a new 64GB uSD card (durable)?
Is there a possibility to swap the uSD on the RPi4 and replace e.g. the SSD?

Thanks.

[Cbarth3 (Chris B)]

I use Hassio and have done a complete backup and moved from micro SD to ssd. Then I moved from pi 3 and ssd to a Dell nuc. Most recently I just moved from the dell nuc to a better Intel nuc.

[NathanCu (Nathan Curtis)]

Second what Chris said - if you’re on HAOS or Supervised this is an easy exercise. FULL backup the installation. Install a new copy of HA / HAOS on your media of choice - make sure it boots, restore backup.

If you’re on core only / docker, I know it involves getting a copy of everything in your configuration folder but I will leave you to folks who know those installation types better than I.

[orange-assistant (the real one)]

@misa1515

How can I quickly and easily swap an existing 32GB uSD card (standard) to a new 64GB uSD card (durable)?

Just do a clean shutdown, take your 32gb sd card and create a image of it with the help of usbimager (need to get the full version from gitlab and not the “write only” lite version from the website).

Then just write the image back to your 64gb sd card.

Last step is probably (if Ha doesn’t do that automagically? ) to raise the the data partition to the full size of the sd card (but technically there is actually no need if you don’t need the space). As we are on flash storage the internal controller decides which cells to be written so you will benefit from the over provisioning in any way.

And for your new “durable” sd card you probably were successfully tricked by the industry. Often they just repeat what is true for other (including “standard”) sd cards too, like being shockproof, waterproof and x-ray proof.

Some sd card manufactures that give 10/15 years or even life time (limited) guarantees usually exclude use cases not described and that typically always includes scenarios with a high random IO with little sequential writes (for example running HaOS)

The label you are gonna aiming for on your sd card is “A2” - the rest is normally of no importance (including the marketing labels “pro endurance” etc.). Beside over provisioning (aka buy bigger cards then you need) can prolong the life of your card.

For more information on that topic you can consult this posts/thread

Home Assistant OS Release 8

The only reason is that this is the default setting from a filesystem which was developed more than 15 years ago at a time spinning hard disks were still the standard and SSDs hadn’t yet hit the consumer market. It’s quite easy: Best is to avoid any “re”-branding and only buy your products from brands that are flash manufactures - I think there is about 3 or 4 companies left in the whole world. If you want to run your operating system from sd card you want a high i/o performance which is not…

Home Assistant OS Release 8

But these “write intensive” tasks are “big junks” or sequential writes (like a video or images). This types of writing will probably have a WAF (write amplification factor) close to 1 because they certainly always will write full “pages” (the host writes will very much equal the flash writes). So this is the perfect scenario for a flash storage as there is virtually no write amplification and you will get the maximum lifetime for your flash storage. If you look at the details for this card: Mi…

[FredTheFrog (Keith)]

Also consider Macrium Reflect Free. Great program, still free. Works a treat.

[orange-assistant (the real one)]

@FredTheFrog

Macrium Reflect Free. Great program, still free.

Any particular reason to prefer a share/freeware which is not open source and only available in exchange for personal data (need to provide a email to get the download link and license from the official site)?

Just asking because USBImager comes as a open source program which is not only available for windows but linux and mac as well. The whole program is not even mb and doesn’t phone home like other solutions like the >500MB etcher spyware