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I recently removed Windows from my computer which left me with a lot of unallocated space (which I later formatted to ext4). So I was wondering if it is possible to "copy" the /home partition from sda11 to sda5 as shown in the image here from Gparted.
I am very new to this, so if someone can give me a detailed procedure to follow, or point me to where I could find one, I will be extremely grateful.
In general it would be a good idea not to use sda5 directly but make it an LVM PV (pvcreate), create an LVM VG for it (vgcreate) and create an LVM LV home in that VG (lvreate). That makes later changes in size much easier and has advatages for backups.
However you do it:
/mnt/tmp/home (to be on the safe side you can run umount /home && mount /home)cp -a /home/. /mnt/tmp/home in /etc/fstab from the old to the new block device (or UUID, see blkid)umount /homemount /homedf -h /home
rsync was made for comparing two directories or directory trees and eliminate the differences (or some of them). It was especially made for doing this over a network. In that case it does a much better job than scp/cp. But in case of an empty target directory none of the rsync features is relevant (unless the procedure is interrupted). So in your case rsync is at least not better than cp.
Aug 9, 2020 at 16:32
cp in lieu of rsync worked absolutely fine. Thanks!
If that is true, then there's a quite simple way to do it with the Gparted UI:
The system will have to physically move the ~27GB of sda5 (/) and possibly also the 55GB of sda11 (/home), so depending on your disk that might take some hours.
You'd need a terminal to do the trick. Either copy the whole sda11 partition over sda5 with a dd like this:
dd if=/dev/sda11 of=/dev/sda5 bs=1M
... or assign /dev/sda5 some mountpoint and copy the data with rsync or whatever file manager you prefer (just be careful to use rsync's -an option to keep access rights). When done, change remove sda11's mountpoint and change sda5 to /home .
Before anything major like this, make sure your backups are up to date.
To move /home uses rsync- Be sure to use parameters to preserve ownership & permissions.
help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving
But you also can use it as a data partition. I keep /home inside / (root) and /home is about 3GB, but have all data in linked folders from a data partition. Does not have to be a second drive as these examples show. Just any other partition.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1013677/storing-data-on-second-hdd-mounting
