streda 18. decembra 2019

WSL home directory migration to MS OneDrive

motivation

There were problems with using WSL on multiple computers (separate home directories) and accessing Google Drive from them (for details, see older posts in this blog, there are some problems and uncomfortable workarounds, when using Google Drive in read-write mode from WSL). Therefore created proof of concept how to have just single "centralized" home directory on OneDrive, accessed from multiple WSLs via C: mounted in WSL as /mnt/c.

setup

It is practical (but not mandatory) to have the same path to OneDrive folder on each Windows computer (unify user and home folder names in Windows, if feeling it that way), e.g.:

C:\Users\Richard\OneDrive\
what in WSL means:
/mnt/c/Users/Richard/OneDrive/

and it is also practical having all "known folders" (as "Desktop", "Documents", "Pictures", etc.) also migrated to OneDrive, to be more sure, that all your files are safely backed by cloud (another story).

Let's assume user and home folder names "Richard" in Windows and "richard" in WSL.

I have not tested following commands as written, just summarized what I did, and it may not be complete or precise enough, because there was a lot of tuning, so be careful and think before doing anything.

From WSL on all computers determined to having /home/richard/ centralized via OneDrive do this:

sudo ln -s /mnt/c/Users/Richard/OneDrive/ /home/richard2
sudo chown richard:richard /home/richard2
sudo mv /home/richard /home/richard_backup
sudo mv /home/richard2 /home/richard

Now you can start new WSL session and see, if your (or richard's) home directory is already placed into OneDrive. From now, you have your home folder accessible from any WSL, where you have your OneDrive and this "symlinking mount" in place.

 (Note: it is also possible to change user name in Windows and there is more than one way to do it.)

migration

Migration of files and folders from your WSL (or other Linux/Unix) home directory can be very specific and differ case by case. Simplistic example:

cp /home/richard_backup/* /home/richard_backup/.* /home/richard

Maybe you will want to migrate only subset of all files and folders, and maybe you will want to do more sorting what to place to which OneDrive subfolder, because in this step you are integrating (merging) your your WSL home directory with your OneDrive, and you want to have an order, not chaos in your files, after that. Also be careful about risk of unwanted file replacements, resolve collisions before it's too late.

file permissions

One caveat is, that file permissions are not set correctly in WSL, and this mask hack in ~/.profile can be useful:

if [[ "$(umask)" = "0000" ]]; then
  umask 0022 # or umask 0027 or umask 0077 for enhanced confidentiality, further reading
fi

but it was not enough in this case and files were switched from originally non-executables to executables, without knowing exactly why. The consequence of executableness were also missing colors in terminal, because ~/.profile need not to be executable for Bash to execute it (counter-intuitive, but safer).

Mask applies to future permisions changes, but past permissions changes can be fixed e.g. this way:

# all permissions removal from all unauthorized:
chmod -R o-rwx /home/richard/

# (potentially dangerous, depending on the specific contents of OneDrive)
sudo find /home/richard/ -type f -exec chmod a-x {} +

# fix executability selectively:
chmod 750 /home/richard/Workspace/*/.git/hooks/{pre-commit,post-commit}

 In order to avoid doing this every time changing WSL instance with potentially different UID, it is also practical to use the same UID according to /etc/passwd in every WSL instance. 

perl

When there is directory ~/.cpan in migrated folder, you may decide not to transfer it, but doing this instead of it:

perl -MCPAN -e shell
install Bundle::CPAN
reload index
reload cpan
exit

other hacks


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