I am running into an issue moving my /home folder from my SSD to an external HDD. I have a dual boot of linux and windows on the SSD and I am running out of space, so I want to move the /home partition to the external drive.
I am following this guide: https://www.maketecheasier.com/move-home-folder-ubuntu/
I have followed the first few steps:
Created a temp home folder at /media/home and on fstab I gave it the UUID of the external partition. This worked fine, I can see this folder with the right size.
I used rsync to copy all the files from /home to /media/home
I run into an issue at this point, I am not able to relocate my /home directory into /home_backup. It tells me that the device or resource is busy. So I looked it up and came to this similar question:
mv: cannot move `/home' to `/old_home': Device or resource busy
Now, reading the first answer and it says that if your /home is it's own partition (which is the case for me) you should ignore that step and comment out the current home paritition in fstab, or the new one will never be mounted.
Is this correct? the next answer says to log out and go on a virtual terminal, run as sudo -i and check lsof -n | grep '/home' to make sure that nothing is open. In my case it lists bash and sudo.
Maybe I'm being too careful, but I need the computer working for university and can't be slowed down by bricking my laptop. Can someone clear up what the right process is? I don't see how I can just mount my new partition at /home, and comment out the currnet partition in fstab while I am actively in the current partition. Especially if what I tried above tells me that sudo and bash are running out of the current /home/username.
Don't know if that makes sense, but hopefully someone can clear this up for me.