Moving $HOME to a separate data partition?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2021 16:48:39 +0200, Bo Berglund wrote:
>Maybe instead of *copying* the symbolic links

Hi,

the first step, to verify the rsync options you were using, doesn't
require background knowledge.

Taking a look at the man page and to understand the man page takes a
while and you could end up with still something unclear. However,
googling and getting the wanted information takes not much time and is
easy to understand.

It's not that hard to answer your question. Btw. you also can take a
look at your copy how rsync copied the symbolic links.

The second step requires some background knowledge you might not have.
Hard links are different directory entries, that share the same inode
numbers. With this knowledge it's not hard anymore to find something
explaining "Finding Duplicate Files in Linux
            To identify the hard links in a single directory"

File foo and bar sharing the same inode might become files foo and bar
with two different inodes by the copy.

When I googled for "rsync and hard links" it took a few seconds to get

"Tutorial details
Difficulty level		Easy"
"Est. reading time		2m"

Try out googling yourself!

As a general note, yes, as long as you aren't doing something really
freakish, the space required by the original is more or less equal to
the space required by the copy, even when using different file systems
for the original and the copy. A difference of tens of GiB by copying
less than 300 GiB is suspect.

An alternative command to rsync was already explained by me. Anyway, if
one thing you were doing without understanding failed, it doesn't help
to do another thing without understanding it.

There's nothing wrong with trial and error, but there is a learning
curve. IMOH the only useful links I can provide at the moment are those
two links:

https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic-updates/virtualbox
https://www.google.com/

Now take an educated guess on how to proceed.

Regards,
Ralf