How to upgrade from dietpi v6.8 running RPi (armv7l) to dietpi on rock64 ?

General Discussion
1

I have installed a fresh copy of dietpi on the rock64.
What now? - How do I transfer installed applications and configuration to rock64?

Thanks,

2

ido2
/mnt/dietpi_userdata + /var/www + /root + /home/dietpi + (in case you have an own user) /home/username should be transferred first.
In case there are software binaries in /mnt/dietpi_userdata/software_name, you need to remove them mostly, just keeping the configuration files, since the binaries must be overwritten/recompiled.
Afterwards (re)install the chosen software titles via dietpi-software. It will migrate most of the settings and software.

Then you might want to transfer some more settings files from /etc or other locations. But this must be done individually only for those software titles/packages where you really miss custom configs. Generally it is recommended to do fresh installs and reapply configurations to assure compatibility in case of newer versions and stuff.

Keep the old SDcard/drive with from the old SBC/machine for a while, so you can always review and in case recover own configurations.

Do you have MariaDB installed and in case ownCloud or Nextcloud? We have a migration script to transfer these savely to a new machine.
In case of MariaDB you need to create a mysqldump, remove /mnt/dietpi_userdata/mysql and after having it freshly installed on the new machine, import the database dump. For ownCloud/Nextcloud this is integrated into the migration script.

1 Like
3

I don’t use MariaDB or Nextcloud.

What about Dietpi configuration (not only the software which is installed)?

  • Where is that stored ; how to move to new device?
4

ido2
Ah yeah you might want to transfer /boot/dietpi.txt and the dot files /boot/dietpi/.dietpi- (before booting up the new device the first time!).

But note that many system configurations must be re-applied, even that they are in dietpi.txt for reference. Some of those are applied on first boot indeed (AUTO_SETUP_…) some have a direct effect (boot wait for network, logging, …) but many require some system settings edit, that depends on the board as well and that need to be re-applied from dietpi-config.

Generally /etc/ is the most common system config directory, but you cannot just copy that, it’s much too device specific. I would only recommend to review changes you manually made to specific files, so you can manually add them to the new device as well. But for everything you did not manually edit, stay with the new defaults from system/software installs and as said dietpi-config.

5

I ended up doing diff -r on /etc and /Dietpi and manually review changes.
It was difficult to diff the applications installed by apt-get though.

6

Good method actually. However I bet the output is enormous? Sometimes less is more :wink:.