home directory copy from 1 machine to another

Question

I want to change machine and take my home directory with me. I made a copy of a home directory from my usual machine with 10.04 and put it on an external H\d. I would like to know where to copy it onto the new machine ith 11.10 without damaging the current home directory and if possible have my bookmarks in my new machines Firefox Thanks

Answer 1

Firefox automatically creates backups of your bookmarks and saves the last ten backups for safekeeping. This article describes how to manually back up your bookmarks, and replace them with a backup.

Backing up and restoring bookmarks

Answer 2

Just take care with the external hard drive, if it is FAT or NTFS it will not preserve permissions.

More likely then not you do not need or want all of your home directory. I would identify the things you want to transfer, firefox bookmarks, Documents, etc and put them in a tar ball (tar.gz). You can then put the tar ball on a FAT or NTFS partition and extract it on the other machine.

tar cvzf home.tar.gz .mozilla Documents

To extract

tar xvz home.tar.gz

Another option would be to use rsync

Answer 3

Copy everthing to a sub directory on your home directory. Then copy down only the stuff you care about to your users root directory.

Regarding the firefox bookmarks, I think you can convert them into HTML and import them later. In that way you can merge your bookmarks.

Answer 4

If you pass a w switch to tar during extraction, it will ask for confirmation before it overwrites.

tar xvfzw file.tar.gz

Or if done with bzip:

tar xvfjw file.tar.gz