Moving external data to other drive

General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,

I have a 3TB external hard drive named “DIETPIEXT” which contains my user data and I was to upgrade to a 6TB hard drive.
If I plug my new hard drive and select it from the list of available drives to move my user data, will it move automatically? Or there is some kind of setup that would be better for me to do before setting the new location.

2

Hi,

many thanks for your message. I did a quick test with 2 USB stickst and for me it was working well to switch user data from one stick to another.

  1. plug the new USB device into the SBC
  2. open drive manager
  3. format the unmounted new device using ext4
  4. mount the new formatted usb device to something like /mnt/usb2
  5. select the new device and mark as user data location
  6. exit drive manager
  7. check data location
cd /mnt
ls -la
  1. user data should be located at dietpi_userdata → /mnt/usb2/dietpi_userdata now
3

Hey, Joulinar, thank you very much!

4

pls let me know if this was working.

5

I will buy the new hard drive this weekend and after I transfer the data I will post a reply here. Thank you once again.

6

Hey, Joulinar. It took about 5 hours to move all my data, but everything went fine.
I wish it had some kind of progress bar or ETA so people wouldn’t need to verify if the files finished moving.
Thanks for the help!

7

good that everything was working fine. :slight_smile:

8

I have another question:
If I make a fresh install of the OS (I’m willing to use the the beta x64 build) and if I set to move my user data to my new install in my current hard drive which already has my user data, would it keep my user data files?

9

honestly I never tried or tested something like this. But I guess files could be overwritten.

Maybe you would need to complete all installations first (without HDD connected) and on a last step plugin your HDD and just link/adjust user data location manually. Before doing this, a backup of your HDD would be highly recommended.