Hi,

Using Ubuntu 22.04.1 on two different machines.

I have a backed up 'home' dir from computer 'A' - say 'homeA.bak'.

I have another computer 'B' which already has a 'home' dir for the principle user as set up upon installation , call him 'usrB'.

Now I want to create a new user 'usrB-2' without a 'home' dir and then create a 'home' dir for 'usrB2' which will be 'homeA.bak'.

I assume from what I read that 'home' directories are not like 'regular' directories' in that they contain other files in them that make them 'home' directories. ie: you just can't make a directory called 'home' and copy backed up files to it and have it act like a 'home' directory.

Can someone tell me how to do this properly? Thanks in advance,
R

Yes a home directory contains a bunch of configuration files and other stuff in hidden files and directories but that can also be backed up. If user b has the same uid,gid then restoring via a file is doable otherwise rsync should work.

It is also quite possible to create the second user with their own directory.
Then restore the content of the backup to the new home directory. Note that you would want to restore the content and not the full directory plus content so you avoid unwanted nesting of directories.
Once that is done then the only thing that should be required would be to use chown to ensure the restored content is properly owned by the second user.

Another possibility would be to restore the backup into /home (full, including users home directory [making sure there is no name conflict with already existing home directories]). Once restored you could remove the users home directory, then rename the restored home directory to the directory name that was created for your new user. Again the final step would be using chown to restore ownership to the new user.

Example - the backup was for user john on machine A.
The second newly created user on machine B is Jack.
Restore the backup into /home on machine B which would create the directory tree /home/john.
Delete the directory tree /home/jack so that directory name does not exist.
Rename /home/john to /home/jack
chown -R jack:jack /home/jack
Your new user jack now has the entire directory tree that originally belonged to john on machine A.

Create the /home directory for your new user, then just copy all the user files of your back up into it.

If the new user has a different ID, just chown the whole user directory recursively.