I currently have the following setup: 500 GB NVME SSD with Windows, 1TB SATA SSD with CachyOS(which has both boot and /home), another 1TB SSD mounted in Linux and an 2 TB HDD which is NTFS. What I plan is, when I eventually get rid of Windows on that one SSD, I want to transfer my CachyOS Boot on there BUT I specifically want to keep my /home on the Sata SSD. I heard rsync could help me out but I want to ask for second and third opinions, since this could be a make-it-or-break-it-situation. Any help is highly appreciated
Just some observations, you’ll have some things to check:
First of all it’s essential that you have backups.
Moving the root partition to another drive you’ll have to change some boot and LUKS (if you’re using encryption) configurations since the UUID and PARTUUID will be different, having to configure fsta, kernel boot parameters etc. If you’re on BTRFS root, home (@, @home, @var etc) and others are not partitions, they are subvolumes of one partition. Basically you have two partitions: boot (VFAT) and “root” in BTRFS; Also moving root to another drive, you’d probably be better moving boot too and leave the 1TB drive to just home; Furthermore in BTRFS land, the btrfs send and receive would probably be a better choice than RSYNC. Probably will be more efficient since uses BTRFS native features;
Using another file system you’d still have to deal with the UUID situation, fstab, LUKS etc.
Better to reinstall on the nvme, make a symlink to you existing home on the ssd, then you can move things like configs over if needed, then you can delete the things you don’t need anymore. Reinstall is simpler and can be useful too. This way you will have all your existing stuff at hand, even can boot to the existing system if things don’t want to work, but they should