[mdlug] Transfering /home with scp

[Dave Arbogast]

Peter Bart wrote:

>Hi Everyone,
>	I'm finally at the point of transferring all my files to my new
>notebook. The old one is a T30 Thinkpad running opensuse 10.3 and the
>new one is a T61 Thinkpad running opensuse 10.3. Can I simply use scp
>to copy the entire /home? Or are there files in /home that would be
>specific to the hardware/operating system it's on? 
>      If I do, I know I must use the -r flag to copy
>directories recursivly, the -p flag to preserve ownership and
>permissions. What about directories/files that allready exist and
>should be replaced, such as /home/.evolution? I've read that cp and scp
>are intentionally similar. The man page for cp lists -f as the flag to
>be used to replace an existing file if it can't be written to. I don't
>see the -f/force flag on scp's man page.  I'm somewhat at a loss on how
>to do that part. Of course I could delete all the files in /home before
>copying. But I've added programs on the new machine so that seems a
>little much because I don't want to remove files that won't be replaced
>and I might need.
>    Would tar be a better, quicker option? ie Create the archive
>of /home on the old machine,
>burn
>it to disc, then unpack it on the new machine? I tried to make an
>archive of my /home several times but I think I wasn't patient enough
>or used the wrong command because it either didn't work or was taking
>several hours. On the other hand it appears that when unpacking an
>archive it overwrites existing files of the same name in the directory
>it's unpacked.
>    There is probably another option I don't know about, so please
>suggest it!
>
>Best Regards, 
>  
>
On a private network I would use SMB or NFS - this gives you better 
control of your structure, I think. Since neither is secure on a public 
network, be sure to disable when done ;-)

-dave