Best way to copy the home directory to a new computer

[Paul Smith]

Dear All,

Could you please suggest me the best way to copy the home directory to
a new computer?

Thanks in advance,

Paul

[Mauricio Tavares]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 6:24 AM Paul Smith  wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Could you please suggest me the best way to copy the home directory to
> a new computer?

If it is just the home directory, you have access to it --
mounted the hard drive to new computer or old computer is accessible
through network -- and both are some kind of OSX/Linux/BSD/Other_Unix,
I would use rsync.

Ex:

rsync --partial --progress -avz source-location destination-location

If, say, source computer is accessible from network, source-location
might look like "ssh user@old_box:."

I like the --partial option because if things go boink you can
continue copying an incomplete file without having to start over.

There are also options to slow down the transfer so you will not hog
the network.

Fun fact: I use something like that to backup my Android phone.
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Paul
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[Tim]

On Tue, 2020-01-21 at 11:23 +0000, Paul Smith wrote:
> Could you please suggest me the best way to copy the home directory
> to a new computer?

If you want a simple long-term solution to this problem, take your old
hard drive, and add it to your new computer, after you have installed
your OS to the new computer.  Then set up new user accounts to use the
old drive's home directory, or modify any existing accounts to do that,
or simply use /etc/fstab to mount /home onto the directory tree from
the second drive (I think the latter is the easiest approach).

If you plan to use a computer across several different releases, and
don't want to work out how to transfer user's homespaces across each
release, it's easier to *not* do that.  Have the OS and home on
separate drives.

Each new release installation can be done over the top of the old OS
drive without losing any data on your home drive.  And if you're wary
that you might accidentally install to the wrong drive, you can always
unplug it for the installation period.

There's probably a few other directories that some people might want to
keep on the second drive, for the same reason.  Such as /var/www, if
they serve websites.  Likewise with databases.

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2020 at 2:27 PM Tim via users
 wrote:
> > Could you please suggest me the best way to copy the home directory
> > to a new computer?
>
> If you want a simple long-term solution to this problem, take your old
> hard drive, and add it to your new computer, after you have installed
> your OS to the new computer.  Then set up new user accounts to use the
> old drive's home directory, or modify any existing accounts to do that,
> or simply use /etc/fstab to mount /home onto the directory tree from
> the second drive (I think the latter is the easiest approach).
>
> If you plan to use a computer across several different releases, and
> don't want to work out how to transfer user's homespaces across each
> release, it's easier to *not* do that.  Have the OS and home on
> separate drives.
>
> Each new release installation can be done over the top of the old OS
> drive without losing any data on your home drive.  And if you're wary
> that you might accidentally install to the wrong drive, you can always
> unplug it for the installation period.
>
> There's probably a few other directories that some people might want to
> keep on the second drive, for the same reason.  Such as /var/www, if
> they serve websites.  Likewise with databases.

Thanks to all for your help. Done!

Paul