home dir to usb

[betty]

i'm sure i know less than you, the advice was to use dd. is one better 
than the other?? i'm willing to use whatever will work to copy my home 
dir to the new computer so that all my settings are the same.

what would be the command for cp?
thx
betty i

Eric Cope wrote:
> please excuse my ignorance, why would cp -r not work?
> Eric
>
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 9:33 PM, betty <nicepenguin at webcanine.com 
> <mailto:nicepenguin at webcanine.com>> wrote:
>
>     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.
>     www.webcanine.com <http://www.webcanine.com>
>     information for people
>     who care for dogs.
>
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>
> -- 
> Eric Cope
> http://cope-et-al.com


-- 
betty i.
www.webcanine.com
information for people 
who care for dogs.