I've recently added an additional, larger internal drive to a PC running Ubuntu Linux 22.04.4. I want to move an existing R project from another local drive to this new larger drive. I've copied all content from the old drive to the new drive, and have verified that R projects copied include everything from the old drive. The partitions on the new and old drives have different names but the same read/write/execute permissions. They are of course different physical devices.
When I try to open projects in RStudio that have been copied to the new drive, I get system 5 error input/output error messages. I can run R from the CLI in the root directories of these projects, and all content appears to be ok.
What should I look to change in the copied projects for use in RStudio?
This issue does make me wonder about what would happen if I needed to restore existing projects from a back up to a new drive.
I suppose that one way to do this is to copy all non-project-related files into a new directory on the new drive, and then create a new project in that directory. This works, although doing it over and over again for 25 or so existing projects seems less convenient than it should be. I also had VS Code projects that I copied from the old drive to the new drive, and they launch and work w/o probs.
I'm of the impression that the industry standard for making projects reproducible (with others, and your future self) is providing a version control backend (which brings many other benefits also). Rstudio has good git integration ( I havent tried it with any other vcs) .
I can delete my harddrive, and if I have access to my repo on a well trusted system (Github or Azure ... etc. ) I can restore a project to whereever I want.
Just caution that its best to back up only code and small files (such as a project file), less so data, though extensions like git-lfs do exist to help with that also.
Thanks, @nirgrahamuk. That's good advice. I've chosen to keep some projects local because of the nature of the data, with incremental and total local backups. I suppose I could clone to a private GitHub repo, but I'm not sure that the data owners would be comfortable with it. I use some private repos for some course content.
Ensure the new drive is mounted with the correct options and permissions. Check for any broken symbolic links within the copied projects. You might also need to update file paths in RStudio project settings. Additionally, updating RStudio to the latest version could resolve compatibility issues. This approach should help address potential restoration concerns from backups.