Switching from SD to booting From USB

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I was just reading the notes on BrewBox.com regarding switching from the MicroSD cards to booting from an external, USB SATA drive. Seems appealing to me, as I’ve had these SD cards fail before. The hardware seems pretty straightforward, but the linked documentation only talks about doing it from a new RPi image, and requires you to use a GUI utility in the RPi desktop to copy the image from the SD card to the USB drive. Can I “uninstall” the desktop/UI stuff afterwards? Or I guess I can disable the desktop stuff with raspi-config. I’ll have 240GB of storage, so I guess having the desktop stuff on there won’t impact me much, if at all.

What other considerations are necessary to make this seamless as possible. I assume I can just do a full backup prior, and restore after I get a fresh copy of docker and BrewBlox installed. I assume my IP address won’t change, as it’s tagged in my router. All the spark and block config should come back from the backup, right?

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The simplest way to go about this is to treat it as a fresh install.

  • make a snapshot of your brewblox system
  • copy the snapshot to your normal computer
  • install RPI imager on your normal computer
  • using RPI imager, flash your SD card with the firmware image that enables USB boot (it’s under utility tools)
  • load that SD card in your Pi and connect power
  • wait a few minutes for firmware to update
  • disconnect power and unload the card
  • follow normal brewblox install instructions, but now using a USB drive instead of an SD card.
  • load your exported snapshot during or after installation.
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