Hi, fellow OMV'ers!
(Please bear with me if this post gets a bit lengthy - possibly incomplete tl;dr at the end.)
Long time OMV user here: started many years ago with version 2 (I guess).
OMV 4 is/was running happily on a power-frugal HP Microserver Gen7 with a lot of RAM.
In addition to OMV and plugins, I have installed some 3rd party software on the system (wiki, caldav, carddav, octoprint, ecodms, ...) -> this part is important for the question.
The system disk (hdd) showed a few relevant SMART errors, therefore I will replace it with a small ssd.
What are my goals?
- keep the HP Microserver
- replace the system hdd with a ssd
- upgrade to the latest OMV
- keep the OMV configuration (mainly users, SMB shares and NTFS mounts/shares)
- keep the 3rd party software I installed
- set up with a clean, fresh, shiny new OS install, due to the fact that the initial OS setup was ages ago and has only been upgraded over the years. There are remnants of old, no longer used software (e.g. Crashplan) that I can't clean out completely, I guess
- ...
What I already did, in chronological order - a bit messy, maybe:
- Plan A: backup 4.x OMV config and restore it to a fresh 5.x install
- took a backup of 4.x with the backup plugin (fsarchive format)
- removed the 4.x system hdd
- connected the new system ssd and installed 5.x from the official OMV ISO
- got stuck restoring the config, was unsure about version conflicts, got confused. consulted the forum, got more confused, decided to go for Plan B.
- Plan B: upgrade the OMV 4.x on the hdd to 5.x, backup the new config, set up the SSD with a 5.x ISO and restore the config.
- Removed unsupported plugins from 4.x
- upgraded using this post/thread by @ryecoaaron
- deleted the browser cache
- consulted the forum and deleted some more plugins from cli
- deleted the browser cache
- logged in successfully and checked the OMV config
- PHEW!
- took a system backup, using the backup plugin (fsarchive)
- noticed that most 3rd party software is no longer working as it was depending on the NGINX-plugin (see #7)
- got some sleep
So this is the status now:
- The old system HDD has been upgraded to 5.x,
- my 3rd party software is still 'there', but no longer running (needs some work, obviously)
- the new system SSD has a clean 5.x install, but is switched off, currently
- I have a backup! Two actually: one from 4.x and the current 5.x!
Going forward, I have at least these options:
option 1: Clone the HDD to the SSD.
Go with the existing install and accept that I will possibly schlepp along some file remnants from 2.x...4.x.
Then use the system on the SSD and repair the 3rd party software installations.
What would be the best way to do this? Clonezilla? OMV backup (which bu type?)?
option 2: restore the 4.x backup to the SSD and perform an in-place upgrade to 5.x on the SSD.
I guess this has no benefit over option 1. I just wanted it to mention.
option 3: restore the OMV 5.x backup to the fresh 5.x install on the SSD
This has some unknowns:
- what part of the fsarchive backup will I need to restore? I haven't found a documentation how to just restore the OMV "config" files (samba, nfs, syncthing,...) and be ready with the new install.
- Will this move over the currently used 3rd party apps or do I need to re-install them?
Any thoughts, any additional options? Have you been there as well? What did you do? How did it end?
I'd appreciate your comments, especially in regards to the different future options and the fsarchive restore.
Thanks for reading!
...and here it comes:
tl;dr: I want to upgrade a messy and dated OMV 4.x installation with a few 3rd party apps and plugins to 5.x and move the system to an SSD. Got lost in the process and need to decide between several options.