Mark Sargent wrote on Mon, 17 Apr 2006 19:06:03 +0900:
I've just had to relocate and am using a new installation of Linux. I wasn't able to clone the previous machine's drive, so copied the directories to our server via FTP, but, I am wondering how best to approach this as I've never done this before. I'm interested in preserving all home stuff as well as apps I previously installed, but wonder whether just copying from old to new installation will work. It's the same OS and version. Will I run across lots of roblems with this?
If you don't use SELinux just copying over should be fine, mostly. However, I wouldn't recommend it, apps sometimes spread their files a bit so you may miss one or two ... Also, your rpm/yum database is not in sync then. What I usually do (on server machines) is reinstall all software that is really needed (which usually results in less software getting installed than on the old machine ;-) and then replace their configuration files with the old ones. Home directories, MySQL databases etc. can just be "carried over". And you can carry over users by just adding them with cat or a text editor to the passwd/shadow/group/gshadow files.
Kai