home dir to usb

Thu Dec 31 11:09:41 MST 2009

"i am such an idiot on command line stuff."

"please excuse my ignorance"

"i'm sure i know less than you"

I'm not sure what, but something seems really out of place here for
PLUG.  Maybe there's something in the valley water supply?  :)

Happy New Year,  -jmz

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Kurt Granroth
<kurt+plug-discuss at granroth.com> wrote:
> 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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