[conspire] How do I determine what I need to keep from my internal hard drive and what is the recommend way to move things to an external hard drive

[Mark Weisler]

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Darlene Wallach wrote:
> Looks like my laptop has a loose connection and fixing it is cost
> prohibitive so it makes more sense to buy a new laptop. So how do I
> determine what to save off/keep/backup/image from my internal hard
> drive? And what is the recommended way to save the stuff off?
> 
> I have an external hard drive I can move things to.
> 
> I already moved all the data files onto my external hard drive.
> 
> Thank you for your attention, advice, and assistance
> 
> Darlene Wallach
My recommendations...
1. Make a backup ASAP.
2. Probably the single most important directory to backup is /home
3. rsync is a good backup tool...  you could use something like...run on
your old computer...that's the way I would recommend for saving data off to
an external drive for safekeeping.


 rsync -avr --progress /home /media/<mounted partition>/myStuff
which would copy your home directory to what I believe is your external drive.

4. Get that new laptop ASAP so that you can set it up and use it while the
old one still has life in it an can be booted. (Parallel usage is a good thing.)
5. Copy the backup of /home from your old computer to your new computer into
a directory of your choosing.
6. There will be some configurations or settings in the old computer that
you want in the new computer and that were not backed up. Using the new
computer will make you realize which ones are important to you and you can
still fetch them from the old computer (they may not necessarily be in the
/home directory of the old computer but at least you will be able to hunt
them down).


- --
Mark Weisler
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