I undertook a sizeable upgrade today, bringing a skylake era build into the 2020s with a 13th gen. All core components- memory, motherboard, GPU, everything must go… except the drives. We were nervous, my friend really felt we should reinstall. There was debate, and drama. Considerations and exceptions. No, I couldn’t let my OS go. I have spent years tweaking and tuning, molding my ideal computing environment. We pushed forward.
Well I’m pleased to say it was mostly uneventful. The ethernet adapter was renamed causing misconfigured dhcp, but otherwise it booted right up like nothing happened. Sorry, linux is boring now.
So about that. I don’t use rsync, but any regular bulk reads/writes will wear an SSD quickly!
What I meant was, if your drive(a) isn’t new with the new build, I would recommend it. I’ve been seeing failure rates on SSDs with hard use (like weekly backups) at only the 3-5 year mark. And usually when they die its all at once.
No worries, it’s all good! It’s basically two identical drives. The backup drive doesn’t get much use outside of the rsync process, but if the main drive fails, I am able to jump onto to the backup drive without much interruption. Before rsync runs it does a comparison and only moves modified files, so it’s not a bulk rewrite every week- just brings the target up to parity with the source. If both of these drives kick the bucket at the same time I guess that will just have to accept it as very bad luck lol, only so much I can do. But the plan is when the main drive fails, backup will get promoted to main until I’m able to backfill another drive.
Oh right on, I didn’t realize rsync was just a differential copy–thays dope! I hope I didn’t come off paranoid lol… I work in a PC repair shop (mostly Windows machines) and I am not used to the average consumer giving a cleaver answer about backups and drive maintenance.
Congratulations again on the new machine. Hope it treats you well!