[CentOS] Updating/Backing Up Server

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 12:50 PM, Matt <matt.mailinglists at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am slowly migrating the data etc off an old CentOS32 4.x server to a
> new CentOS64 5.x server.  The old server only has 15Gbyte of its hard
> drive in use.  Is there an easy/safe way to copy the entire contents
> of old server root directory to a directory on the new server for
> future reference?  Most of the data is various test files, perl
> scripts, etc. scattered all over.

Yes, with new machines typically having many orders of magnitudes more
storage than old ones it is easier to keep a backup of old stuff
online than to sort through it.   If both machines are still running,
on the old one, cd to /, then
rsync -av . new_machine:/path/to/save
perhaps using --exclude to avoid the /proc and /sys directories.
Rsync will create the last directory in the target path if it doesn't
exist, but only the last one.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com