Hi, I have used Linux quite a lot in the past, but not for several years. As I recall, Linux has some incredibly powerful tools for hard drive partitioning, cloning and for restoring backups.
Well anyway, when I built my Home Assistant machine, I rather went with an ultimate configuration and included a 120GB MSATA SSD. I won’t bore you with the details of my build, but my chain of logic was that since Linux has some extremely powerful tools for making and restoring back-ups to another drive, it should be a piece of cake just to follow the most popular set up guide, install and configure home assistant on a MicroSD card and then clone this install to my SSD.
Is there a way this can be done? If so which tools are available? Or was my rational somehow flawed?
I like rsync for fs cloning, but that does not get the boot flag for partitions, I think you want dd… this is assuming you are talking about Home Assistant OS
Well this might be dumb. But to be honest I don’t know the distinction between Home assistant OS and anything else? All I did was follow the guide on the Home Assistant page to install Home Assistant to a MicroSD card. So assuming that was/is Home Assistant OS (and given that I have CL access through terminal), is dd available in Home Assistant? If not, can it be installed somehow?
I have spent several weeks configuring my current install on the MicroSD card. I would prefer to clone and restore from a backup if possible? I am not being critical and I very much appreciate the responses, but there seems to be a bit of a culture in the Home Assistant community of avoiding using standard Linux command line tools to achieve relatively common tasks?
You have been given a method to backup and restore. If you don’t want to do that, use rsync, dd, cp, whatever. If a tool is not on the system, use (eg) apk add rsync
The first task I think should be that I want to see my hard drives and partitions and format them from the command line. Are there any tools available for this?
I like playing with the command line. It was the first add on I installed when I set my system up. I feel it makes things easier, rather than more difficult.
To be fair, I missed this response. Unfortunately this would require disassembly of my entire build to get at the SSD. So using standard cloning tools would be preferable in this case.
I think fdisk will be there. But don’t forget you can partition and format your drive from any computer, or boot the pi into raspbian os on a spare sd card and proceed to partition and format from there.
So just to check, before I go destroying anything. Is my SD card home assistant install referred to as /dev/mmcblk0 in the attached lsblk partition list - and is the as yet unused SSD refereed to as SDA? What should I use to format the SSD and in what file system should it be formatted? (It turns out the SSD is smaller than I remember, but I collected all the parts for my home assistant build over about 4 months, so I guess I must have been confused.) I don’t think it’s formatted, but it should be 120GB, but is only 111GB.
