home dir to usb

[Kurt Granroth]

OR... maybe better yet, if you want to copy your entire hard drive onto 
a bigger one, follow this step-by-step guide (with screenshots!)

http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live/doc/showcontent.php?topic=03_Disk_to_disk_clone

On 12/30/09 8:13 PM, Kurt Granroth wrote:
> Your advice to use 'dd' was referring to something other than copying
> your home directory ;-)
>
> The 'dd' command is as low-level and hard-core as you typically can get.
>    It is used to make a *perfect* byte-by-byte copy of a file.  However,
> it's rarely used to make copies of "normal" files anymore.  Instead,
> it's used to make copies of "block" files.  That is, all hard drives and
> all partitions in the hard drives have a special pseudo file called
> /dev/something.  So if you want to make a perfect copy of an entire hard
> drive (including all file systems with their inodes and logs and
> everything), then you use 'dd'.  The normal 'cp' and the like can't get
> low-level enough to deal with things like that.
>
> ('dd', btw, stands for "Copy and Convert".  Supposedly it was initially
> shortened to 'cc' but since that was taken by the compiler, they used
> 'dd' instead.)
>
> If you want to copy a directory, your best bet is to use 'cp' or
> 'rsync'.  Why the choice?  Well, 'cp' is an old-school Unix utility and
> it was never built to fully handle directories.  The GNU version of 'cp'
> (which is what you are using) *can* handle directories and permissions
> and the like and so it'll work just fine... but people who have been
> around Unix long enough (and those who work on disparate Unix and
> Unix-like systems), tend to avoid counting on GNU cp since there's no
> guarantee that it'll be on any given system.
>
> 'rsync', on the other hand, is nearly ubiquitous and it works awesome
> for copying directories.  It is, by far, the most common tool used for
> copying or backing up entire directory structures.
>
> So you have a couple of choices to make. First, do you want to copy
> *everything* off of the old hard drive to a new one?  Or do you only
> want to copy off the home directory?
>
> In either case, I recommend using 'rsync'.  Thar be dragons when using
> 'dd' and it won't help you much in either case here.
>
> So..
>
> 1. Mount your new USB drive and format it as ext3 or ext4.  You should
> be able to do that in a fairly GUI manner with any half-way modern Linux
> desktop.
>
> 2. Do you see where the USB drive is mounted?  I'll pretend it is
> /mnt/usb for this example.  Do the following if you are copying over
> just your home directory:
>
> $ rsync -azvH /home/stormy /mnt/usb/
>
> If you are copying over your entire hard drive, then:
>
> $ sudo rsync -azvHx --exclude=/proc --exclude=/dev --exclude=/sys /
> /mnt/usb/
>
> On 12/30/09 7:13 AM, betty wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
>
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