Move /home to another HD?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Fri, 2008-03-14 at 14:45 -0500, Eric Weir wrote:
> [1]What does "transfer the directory in *single user mode*" mean?

Single user mode means "recovery" mode in Ubuntu.

Doing this in single user mode means that you will not have open files,
and certain portions of the system (such as gconf) will be copied to the
new hard disk in a consistent state.  Single user mode is generally far
easier (and is universally possible) compared to copying a filesystem
snapshot, which isn't possible on all systems AFAIK.

> [2] You refer to "/home" versus "/new-home." Does the directory on the
> new drive have to have a different name from the current home
> directory? If the answer is yes at least during the process of moving
> from one HD to the other, can "/new-home" be renamed after the move is
> finished?

Yes, it can be renamed after the tar command is finished.  You can even
move the old /home to /oldhome before you start.  However, don't get
used to that idea:  You can "mv" a normal directory, but you cannot "mv"
a mounted directory, so if you want to upgrade your storage on /home in
the future, you will either need to remount /home on /oldhome, or simply
work in /newhome until you're ready to swap it all out.

Note that as Brian mentioned, you can use 'rsync' as well.  Which one
you choose is up to you; if you're moving all of the files though, and
the destination drive doesn't have anything on it (since you'll be
formatting it anyway), either way works just fine.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/

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