I've got a second machine that I want to use as my main machine, so I can give my sister a reliable box.

When you need to move your data to a new box, how do you do it?

Is there an easy way to move everything over at once without breaking anything?

Thanks!

Wow, this depends on a lot of details... what do you have available?

1.Are both machines on a LAN? If so look into the tar command; just make one big tarball of everything you need and scp or ftp it over.

2.If a LAN isn't an option, there is always: Install operating system on Machine A, yank harddrive of Machine B and slap it in A, copy what you want from HD, move drive back.

3.Got a CD Burner?

Those are the first 3 things that come to mind.

Cheers,

Finegan

Check out Mondo at http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/. You should be able to clone your setup with it, or just transfer the data you need. I just downloaded it the other day and haven't had time to play with it, but it looks like it should do what you want.

Dale

I have a network set up, and I tried copying my entire /home directory to the new computer, but that only broke things. Both computers have Mandrake 8.2, with identical user accounts and root passwards, but their hardware is completely different.

I looked at Mondo, but my machines have different hardware, so I don't think a clone of my system will work on the second box.

Maybe there isn't an easy way to do what I want? I know there wasn't in windows.

So you don't mean just d/l music and things of that sort. You mean actually installed progs and user settings? While having diff hardware most likely won't work with the installed progs, I believe there is probably a way to keep user settings. If you did a:
cp /dev/hda/home /dev/hdb/home...
Instead try just cp'ing user by user. I think .profile and .bashrc are going to alot of the things you'll want to save. Of course it's late here so I might be totally wrong, but good luck.

What do you mean by 'data' I guess would be the next question?

If you just want to take over the contents of one directory, just tarball the stuff, its easy. For instance, on Mandy crate #1 (insert your username where bob is)

cd /home/bob
tar czvf wholelottastuff.tar.gz *

This will take everything in the directory /home/bob (hence the *), and stuff it all into a single file (tar and the f option for file and c for compress), it'll print everything to the screen while it squishes it (hence the v for verbose), and zip it so it takes less space (der, the z, and also the .gz extension). Copy that to /home/bob on the other machine and extract it with:

tar xvzf wholelottastuff.tar.gz

(the x is for extract, you get the idea on the rest).

Cheers,

Finegan