How to backup the users
Alphons "Fonz" van Werven
a.j.werven at student.utwente.nl
Sun Jan 27 09:37:43 PST 2008
Ivan "Rambius" Ivanov wrote:
> I was only unsure how to proceed with the users backup.
If users are the only thing you wish to back up:
/home
/etc/group
/etc/master.passwd
You can backup system files (/etc, /usr/local/etc, /var) if you want but
that's another topic.
Some hints:
1. Check if there are users who have their home-dir outside /home...
2. Check /tmp to see if users have files there (they shouldn't count on
those being preserved, that's not what /tmp is for, but you might want
to offer a little bit of extra service by doing this anyway)
3. There might be slight differences between the current /etc/group and
/etc/master.passwd and the ones on the new system. So, instead of
blindly copying the old ones onto the new system, I suggest you add the
relevant entries in the old files to the new files by hand (or script).
4. If you copy the encrypted passwords, then users don't need to set a new
password after you've reinstalled the system.
5. Keep track of UIDs/GIDs: you might need to do some chowning to give
everybody their files back if their (numerical) UIDs/GIDs have changed.
6. If you don't need to repartition your disks, it might be an option to
just leave /home alone during the reinstall (set the newfs flag to N).
That leaves /home untouched and you can just mount it afterwards.
Hth,
Alphons
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