My Freedombox is humming away quietly and doing what it is supposed to do. In this case it is running Syncthing and Radicale.
It is running on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ with an 8 Gb sd card. I am now planning on replacing that sd card with a 200 Gb card. What would be the best way to go about it? Has anyone done this before succesfully?
Another route a bit further away in the future would be to hook the Pi up with a 1 TB ssd and running the Freedombox from the ssd instead of the sd card. But for now, I’m focussing on the 200 Gb sd card.
I envision back-ups, data transfers, copying config files and such. Any help is appreciated.
The easiest way to move is using the dd command to make a clone of the 8 GB card and writing it to the 200 GB one (for writing, Balena Etcher can also be used). I remember doing this a year ago with Raspberry Pi 2.
Backup and restore using the Backups app in FreedomBox should also work.
You will have to transfer the data of any manually installed applications, plugins and websites by yourself.
Thanks! Meanwhile I also installed Matrix and Samba. And because of Matrix I might decide to make it a real upgrade and go for the Raspberry Pi 4 B 4 Gb combined with the 1 TB ssd.
Any news on how the Freedombox image RPi 4 is coming along? And would it evenually be possible to boot from the ssd in stead of the more vulnerable sd card?
No news yet, but Raspberry Pi 4 will be supported once all the required components are available in Debian. The Raspberry Pi series will likely remain the only official nonfree images for FreedomBox.
In the medium term, you can use the Pine A64+ boards (2GB RAM) or wait for the official images of Rock Pro 64 or Nano Pi M4V2 (2 or 4GB RAM) to be released. These images are fully free software unlike the Raspberry Pi ones.
This depends on the boot order priority. I was recently experimenting with a Nano Pi M4V2, which seems to have eMMC storage as the highest priority, followed by microSD card and then external storage. If the first two are not available, then the third one might be picked up, but this might differ based on the board.
We have successfully experimented booting a Pioneer edition FreedomBox from a hard disk connected through the SATA interface (microSD card not inserted).