[PLUG] Moving/copying old home to new machine

[Michael]

Paul, Russel,

Both of you have used relative terms in describing sizes.

What is small-ish?
What is VERY LARGE?

Please describe in terms file count, aggregate size of data, or other 
metrics.

If nothing else it will provide some humor in the future. "They 
considered that VERY LARGE? hahahaha" "small-ISH? it's less than a disk 
block, that's tiny."




On 2017-09-05 09:42, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Sep 2017, Denis Heidtmann wrote:
> 
>> I am wanting to copy my home folder from my old machine to my new one. 
>>  I
>> was planning on putting either the old or the new drive in a usb dock 
>> and
>> copying everything over using cp -pr.  But web comments mention rsync.
>> What are the risks/rewards of the various choices?
> 
> For a one-time copy of a small-ish directory tree, either will probably 
> suffice.
> 
> If you experience a mid-copy failure, rsync won't recopy any files
> that have already been copies, whereas cp will just start again from
> the beginning.
> 
> As someone else mentioned, rsync can work over the network.
> 
> rsync over a network can handle the situation where your UID/GID on
> the source system is different from that on the destination.
> 
> Typically "cp" will be somewhat faster while rsync Pauwill be safer and
> more flexible.
> 
> Personally, I'm a fan of using tar over ssh for initial copies,
> because tar handles hard and soft links gracefully and quickly:
> 
> cd /home
> tar cf - yourdir | ssh your.new.host "cd /home && tar xf -"
> # if you're really seeking safety, then run sync too.
> # XXX: note lack of trailing slash in source directory.
> rsync -av  /home/yourdir  your.new.host:/home
> 
> Of course, that just muddies the water of your original question. :-)


-- 
       Michael Rasmussen, Portland Oregon
     Be Appropriate && Follow Your Curiosity