[arch-general] Ubunto to Arch complete data migration

[Leandro Papi]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2019 at 21:58, Jens John <lists at 2ion.de> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 12 Aug 2019, at 21:02, Matt Zand via arch-general wrote:
> > 1- what is the easiest way to do this?
>
> rsync -aAXv --progress --human-readable $source $destination
>
> > 2- do I need to partition hard-drive of new PC exactly as old one?
>
> No.
>
> > 3- will root and other user credentials stay the same?
>
> No, because I wouldn't recommend overwriting the default shadow and passwd files without fixing and matching UIDs/GIDs for system accounts already present in Arch.
>
> Yes, because of course you can set passwords and secrets as you see fit.
>
> Treat data and system configuration as different entities; the rest will follow.


Unfortunately, for some software packages the configuration files are
not positioned in the same place.
Take for example httpd (apache), while Arch keeps its configuration
files in the commonly used directory /etc/httpd, Ubuntu uses
/etc/apache2.

So a simple rsync will not put everything in the exact place you need.

My workflow when I did change my laptop from Fedora to Arch was to
simply check for each package I installed (because you will have to
install them) the correct configuration path, and manually merge the
configuration files from my old laptop with the default ones provided
with the package.

It's a bit of work, but in the long run will familiarize you with the
"right" places in which those configurations should go.