[mdlug] Transfering /home with scp

[Ein Bielaczyc]

On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 1:25 PM, Peter Bart <peter at petertheplumber.net> 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,
>
>  --
>  Peter The Plumber sm on the Road
>  State Licensed Plumber
>  State Certified Backflow Device Tester
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>
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I've had much success using rsync to transfer files. If security is a
concern rsync can employ the use of ssh to transfer data inside a
secure connection. If security is not a concern then I'd also
recommend NFS, as it is fairly easy to setup, and then use rsync to
transfer.

Just FYI, the following would sync "/home" on Old-Machine and New-Machine.

As root on Old-Machine:
       rsync -a -e ssh /home/ root at new-machine:/home/

There are many other options with rsync to control just what is, and
what isn't, transferred.

-- 
Ein Bielaczyc <ebielaczyc at gmail.com>

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