On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 7:22 AM, wwp <subscript at free.fr> wrote: > Hello Timothy, > > > I personally would not copy FROM or TO running systems. Thus, > proceeding to the copy from a third (liveCD or not) system sounds good > to me. > Agreed. It appears others have had success doing so; but, I prefer to eliminate as many variables as possible. I've done the following: 1. yum update Server 1. 2. complete a minimal CentOS install on Server 2. <<must be the same version as Server 1>> 3. yum update Server 2. 4.Then boot both using LiveCD of choice. <<no chroot necessary when using LiveCD environment>> 5. rsync --delete-after --force -aAHPWl --exclude-from="/root/centos7-rsync-exclude.txt" / root at 10.10.10.200:/ <<----the host address of the server to receive the sync/copy. ((that's a lowercase "L" after "-aAHPW")) 6. the "centos7-rsync-exclude.txt" file contains: boot dev etc/fstab etc/grub2.cfg etc/mtab etc/default/grub etc/networks etc/sysconfig/network* etc/sysconfig/kernel etc/udev lib/modules mnt proc sys tmp var/lock