home dir to usb

[betty]

I installed the new drive into the new computer. I'm going to transfer 
the home directory to a usb drive and then to the new computer.
This is the command i tried and the result i got.

 stormy at stormy-desktop:~$ sudo dd if=/home/stormy of=/dev/sdc1 bs=1024k
[sudo] password for stormy:
dd: reading `/home/stormy': Is a directory
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 bytes (0 B) copied, 0.000942499 s, 0.0 kB/s
stormy at stormy-desktop:~$

What is wrong there? i am such an idiot on command line stuff. aghhh.
Thanks.
betty i.

Joseph Sinclair wrote:
> First, I'd definitely recommend going with a new SATA drive on the new machine.  You'll find everything just works better and the added reliability of a newer drive makes for a lot less stress (although regular and frequent backups are definitely the best peace-of-mind tool).
>
> For the data transfer there are 3 simple options:
> 1) If you have, or can borrow, a large enough USB drive (flash or HDD), I'd copy everything (I prefer rsync, but dd is a good choice too) to the USB drive, then copy from that to the new computer.
> 2) Temporarily install the old drive in the new machine on the ATA (CDROM) interface (if the new machine has an old-style ATA interface for the CD drives), and copy the data from one drive to the other (definitely use rsync here).
> 3) Connect the two machines to an ethernet router/hub and use rsync to transfer the files over the ethernet connection.
>
> However you end up doing the transfer, I'd definitely recommend retaining a separate backup of all of your personal data (pictures, documents, music, videos, etc...) as part of the process, if at all possible.
>   
-- 
betty i.
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