Yes there are lots of methods to do this. Format the disk to something like ext4, untar a distro to it, then with wsl chroot into the disk, finish installing and configuring everything, then reboot to the new disk. You will need specific time to do an this, but should be fairly straight forward.

I essentially did exactly this for my current setup.

There are other ways to.

My instance of Lemmy doesn’t support down votes, and I’m sure others are the same.

After about a year on void Linux, I would agree. It’s a great, solid, and underrated distro 👍

My always on server hosting 20+ services draws no more than 50w at peak during the night backup, but that lasts maybe an hour or so, normally runs nearer 5w-10w when the hdd’s are spun down and unmounted 22 hours a day. I use an Intel n97 CPU in a mini pc. Navidrome, immich, adguard home, Lemmy, find my device, forgejo, file browser quantum, sterling pdf, valutwarden just to name some of the services it runs easily. Paying 22p per kWh in the UK.

Anything slightly better than a potato will run all of that except the llm’s. To have a useful llm you need to spend circa £1k on a GPU and even then it won’t come close to Claude or chatgpt. Skip the llm’s for now. Just get yourself a solid little server to do everything else you need. Add dedicated hardware specifically for llm’s in future if you really want to. An old used gaming pc will be plenty for your server. I personally use Debian , but there are loads of suitable options available

uk can go to 13A peak load on the standard 230v socket, but drawing that for a prolonged period will nuke the socket. 10a prolonged is perfectly safe in the uk.

No, I have the file system mounted to my pc with sshfs. My pc comes on and my server gets mounted in fstab using sshfs, and then I can use anything on my pc to interact with the files and data just like it was directly on my pc. I use WebDAV for my android phone to be able to access office files with only office. I also have file browser quantum on the server providing access through a web interface to the files.

Instead of installing a massive all in one solution, why not install individual services specifically to cover your requirements? Navidrome for music consumption, synching to actually sync files, WebDAV and OnlyOffice for office docs, VLC, Kodi or jellyfin for video consumption, immich for photos, etc.

It will end up being much lighter and more specialised

good response 👍 bad questioning though 👎 i have a nas, with a raid1 array split out with lvm for separate partitions and users on my server, holding 2x2tb ssd’s. This backs up every night to 2x8tb HDD’s. I have a script that i invoke on my machines manually, that runs rsync on important data, and a backup to the nas raid1 array, overwriting the previous invocation. the HDD’s hold out of sync versions running back to 2 months, which i can dip into any time to recover something. so if something does fail, i wont lose anything. I dont hold offsite backups, so if a nuke lands on my house, i will lose everything. Im comfortable with that level of risk, but i know some people arent. however the op wasnt specifically asking about data backup, they were asking about replication, and how to preserve the initial install and setup to be able to revert and replicate. there are better ways to achieve this than just cloning the disk. Build your own actual distro is the best solution and burn it to a usb as a live disk that is easily installed. or just save a list of packages and configs. cloning a disk is a huge amount of out of date data.

What sort of failure? A harddrive failure? I have never had a disk completely fail where every bit of data is unreadable.

For me that would be a waste of time. Just because my setup seems perfect today, tomorrow I might decide to make changes to accommodate a new task. My pc’s are living breathing machines that are always a day or 2 away from a slight tweak.

When I move to a new machine, I rarely want to replicate another machine I have as then I would have 2 machines setup for the same tasks. Each machine serves a different purpose so needs a different setup.

If I am replacing a machine, then I would transfer the physical disk itself. Only use clonezilla type tools for replacing a disk, as in replacing the sata SSD holding root with a new fast nvme.

It’s easy to transfer config files from one machine to another if you want to replicate some specific setups.

I don’t fully understand what you are trying to do? Are you using an Ubuntu machine, and want to access the nas and win11 storage in your filesystem? If so, just use either samba or sshfs. Easy to setup up and mount into the Ubuntu machine.

Thank you for this! I didn’t realise this existed! I will activate it on my instance 👍

Couldn’t get past the gate keepers to read that article 😕

What filling up means is that you have 16gb of ram, and if your system tries to use it all, it will freeze, crash and require hard rebooting. I have more than double your ram and have hit oom (out of memory) which is a kernel error. Is your do some research around out of memory and how to mitigate and prevent it in Linux, you’ll find multiple solutions and how to check if it is.

Could be oom? How much ram do you have and is it filling up?

Ive been self hosting for years, have a 24/7/365 web server public facing, with 20+ services hosted, including a Lemmy instance. No formal education, qualification or any actual experience in any way. Never had a single course or anything. I work as a commercial manager on complex and large infrastructure construction and engineering projects.

Honestly dd is perfect. Like you say, shrink the partition down first, DD to the new disc, swap discs. That’s it.

Setup a matrix or xmpp server for the messaging.

Welcome to the club! I too have an fyi tld!

I set my Lemmy instance a couple of weeks ago. But hosting isn’t new to me so wasn’t a huge hurdle.