Switching Physical Hard Drives

[tedfroop 34]

Let me preface this with, I have some mental health problems that affect my logical abilities. 

I need to switch drives to increase storage capacity on my Ubuntu box.  So after I copy files, my plan is:

-turn off real time monitoring in all libraries.  

-shut down and pull my current backup drive.

-install and set up the new drive. Check permissions

-disconnect current drive from the mount point that Emby points to for libraries.

-connect new drive to the mount point.  Check permissions.

-turn monitoring back on for libraries.

This will not trigger a re-scan of all my media will it?  Emby should see the same files in the same place? 

 

[Q-Droid 989]

What is on the drive being swapped? Is it media only (libraries) or other Emby server related data such as configuration, databases, metadata, cache? The answer could alter the approach you take. Hopefully not the boot disk.

 

[tedfroop 34]

Media only.  Learned better than to keep data on a system drive many many many years ago.....

[Q-Droid 989]

In that case it shouldn't trigger anything. The important part is to make sure the copy is identical to the source with the exception of more free space. When you make the copy be sure to preserve all file and directory attributes. 

Still a few unknowns so I'm making assumptions.
- Didn't mention how the drives were connected now, whether internal or external.
- Didn't mention how the filesystems are mounted.
- Didn't mention how you plan to copy from old to new.

You shouldn't have to stop monitoring though I would recommend stopping and disabling the Emby server for the cutover. If I were doing this I would take the approach below.

- stop and disable emby-server.
- backup the emby data/config location.
- finish copy/sync of the drives unless completed already. ownership and permissions should be known at this point and easy to check.
- prepare /etc/fstab for drive swap. can leave the entries commented out for both old and new drives.
- power-off and swap drives. or remove old one - whatever is happening in this step.
- power-up and boot.
- finalize /etc/fstab and mount new drive to old path. verify it's what you want.
- reboot and check that new mounted drive matches the original one.
- enable and start emby-server.

If something goes wrong in Emby at this point you can stop it to identify the problem and fix it. Then if needed restore from the data/config backup and try again.

 

[tedfroop 34]

36 minutes ago, Q-Droid said:

Still a few unknowns so I'm making assumptions.
- Didn't mention how the drives were connected now, whether internal or external.
- Didn't mention how the filesystems are mounted.
- Didn't mention how you plan to copy from old to new.

- 2 internal, one data, one live backup.  The new drive is connected via USB at the moment but was set up as an internal drive and formatted using the "drives" utiity ans once copying is complete it will get swapped out for one of the internal drives.

-file systems are mounted through fstab at boot, to mount points /media/SDB and /media/STC and libraries are connected to the drive through that mount point.

- Straight up copy.  As its a data drive, I just run nautilus as sudo, and strait copy and verify everything,

[tedfroop 34]

Worked perfectly.  All but my own faulty memory. 

Started up with the original data drive connected and the new drive. 

Used the Disks utility to set up the new disk, and set mount points. 

Went into fstab and commented out the old drive connection to the mount point Emby uses.  Checked the mount statement for the new drive was in fstab.

mount -a and it switched from old to new.  I ripped some tv shows today and added them to the new drive and once I turned the monitoring back on for the libraries Emby it picked up the new shows and added them.

Everything else is as it was.

Thanks for your suggestions @Q-Droid!