Moving to New Server.. Passwd Questions

[Damian Gerow]

Thus spake Lewis Watson (lists at visionsix.com) [30/11/03 23:22]:
> Thanks for the ideas on the other stuff, I am always looking for new ideas
> and your post has certainly gave me several. I currently use Amanda for
> backing up several directories, including /home, custom scripts, configs,
> etc etc :-)

If you're already using Amanda, you can just use your backups to 'restore'
on to the new drive.

> I did try rsync ( I just never got comfortable with it I guess) for a
> short while myself but found that I like my tape backups. Also, I like the
> idea of just moving the drive(s) over, this is really sounds good for
> /home especially. That would make it easy to bring a new server online and
> with the tape we also have a backup to go with it in the event of a
> failure that knocks out the hard drives (Using raid 1)

One thing that I forgot to mention about using dd -- it's a bad idea to use,
unless the source and destination drives are *exactly* the same size.
Because you're doing a bitwise copy of the drive, you can potentially wind
up throwing things off.  Not to mention that it does a bit-to-bit copy of
*every* bit, whereas dump|restore only nabs the files that actually exist.

> Thanks for the help with the question too, I wanted to make sure that I
> wasn't missing something :-)

Looks like you've got everything you need, to keep usernames and groups
around.