Move nixos-container to different machine

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1

I’m trying to migrate a nixos-container to a different NixOS machine. I copied the container data from the older server to the new server with rsync -av old.server.example.com:/var/lib/containers/gitea /var/lib/containers/gitea and copied the relevant NixOS config to the new server. After running nixos-rebuild switch I’m greeted with working gitea instance, but it doesn’t appear to have any of my data.

When I log into the container with nixos-container root-login and run ls /var/lib/gitea/ I see a mostly empty folder. Outside of the container ls /var/lib/containers/gitea/var/lib/gitea/ shows me a lot of clutter.

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Did I understand something wrong about how NixOS containers work or did something change in the meantime?

2

One possibility is that the uids are different between hosts, and the new one doesn’t match the filesystem owner

3

NixOS container data is stored in /var/lib/nixos-containers and not /var/lib/containers but it used to be in the latter. Could that be old data you’re seeing on the source machine?

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4

NixOS container data is stored in /var/lib/nixos-containers and not /var/lib/containers but it used to be in the latter. Could that be old data you’re seeing on the source machine?

Old server doesn’t have data in /var/lib/nixos-containers but it got NixOS state version 19.09 so maybe it got moved in the last couple years. I will try moving it to nixos-containers on my new server.

5

Thanks, moving the container folder to /var/lib/nixos-containers solved the problem.